Julanne Clarke-Morris is joining Anglican Taonga as Associate
Editor. Julanne was Media Officer for this church before going to
work in Geneva with her husband, Michael Wallace. They are now
back in Dunedin where Michael is Vicar of All Saints. Julanne is
committed to the three-tikanga church, has a theological degree
from Otago, and is a professional photographer. In Geneva she
has been writing and publishing for the World Student Federation.

For the latest on the Anglican world, check out our website:
www.anglicantaonga.org.nz

hose three simple words were the
headline of the Fiji Times editorial
on February 22 this year – and
they summed up the paper’s estimation of
Archbishop Jabez Bryce (right), whose
funeral had taken place four days earlier.
It described him as “humble, yet
forward-looking leader” who was one of
the most senior and respected clerics in
the region.
“His stature as a person, his seniority
as a church leader and status as an elder
regional statesman” was why he had
been chosen to crown the new Tongan
king in 2008.
The editorial noted that there aren’t
many Anglicans in Fiji. Nonetheless, the
Anglican Church “is one of two Christian
denominations (in Fiji) in which people of
all races and colours worship together and
are not divided into communal groups in
order to praise God.”

following

Archbishop Bryce “was a man of deep
prayer and humility” who had promoted
equality between ethnic groups, promoted
women priests and built bridges between
churches.
“We would all do
well,” the writer said,
“to attempt to follow
in the footsteps of
Archbishop Jabez
Leslie Bryce.”
To read longer tributes
to Archbishop Jabez,
go to: http://www.
anglicantaonga.org.nz/
News/Tikanga-Pasifika

Page 3

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

P as E f i k a

Bishop Winston strikes the Great West Doors of Suvaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Holy Trinity Cathedral
three times with the Diocesan Pastoral Staff.

Right: Sepi Hala’api’api, the diocesan youth
co-ordinator, who preached at the installation.

She’s got it!
Lloyd Ashton finds that the kids are all right in Pasefika

W

ithin an hour of being
confirmed by General
Synod as the next Bishop
of Polynesia and the newest
archbishop of this church, Winston Halapua
was sending a clear signal of the course
he intends to steer while at the helm of his
diocese.
He asked Sepiuta Hala’api’api, the
diocesan youth coordinator, to preach at his
August 1 installation in Suva’s Holy Trinity
Cathedral – quite an honour for a young
person.
At first Sepi (who could scarcely believe
her ears, nor hold back her tears) doubted
her ability to deliver:
“Can I do it?” she asked Winston.
“Of course,” he replied.
“Why did you ask me?” Sepi asked.
“Because,” said Winston, “you’ve got it.”
Come August 1, Sepi proved – before a
congregation of around 2000 people – that
she has indeed “got it”.
And Sepi wasn’t the only young person in
Suva showing that she’s got what it takes.
By performing their mass action songs
hundreds of young people played a
significant part in that service, and their
combined contributions, says Bishop
Winston, were “the talking point of the
installation.”
They also show where he’s heading.
“My number one priority,” he confirms,
“will be mission – mission driven and led
by young people.”
Bishop Winston says the church has
been slow to learn lessons that have long
been taken on board by the military, in
technology, in sport and music.
“You look at the air forces of the USA,
Russia and China. Who is flying the fastest
planes? Who is contesting with the enemy
on the battlefields? It’s the young people.

“I believe the church needs to wake up
to its young people. They are there, with
maximum energy and willingness, and they
have the education and skills. We just need
to release them and open the church up to
their energy.”
The day after his installation, at a meeting
of the diocesan standing committee, Bishop
Winston announced two key appointments.
Eseta Mateiviti, a second-year PhD
student at St John’s College in Auckland, is
to become his personal youth consultant.
And both Eseta and Sepi will become
members of standing committee.
Secondly, he told standing committee
that he wanted to see next May’s diocesan
synod electing people to positions of
responsibility solely on the basis of their
merit. In other words, he didn’t want young
people ruled out just because of their age.
Where the young people and their new
bishop are concerned, it’s been a case of
each one setting the other challenges – and
each rising to those challenges.
Five months ago, at the diocesan
electoral synod, the young people had
produced an eight-point statement about
what they yearned for in their new bishop.
They longed for: a God-fearing, visionary
leader who is able to serve ; someone
who is approachable, humble, and loves all
races; someone who will challenge unjust
structures – and who will be a role model,
not only for young people, but for the
church as a whole.
The synod’s choice, they said, “would
directly affect the future of youth in the
mission of the church in the 21st century.”
That message clearly took root with
Bishop Winston. And the 2000 people who
jammed into the cathedral on August 1, and
spilled on to the verandas and lawns that
day, tasted its first fruits.

S

epi and the young people of the
Diocese of Polynesia won’t be
slackening their pace any time
soon, either.
They’re in rehearsals right now for a
choir competition in Holy Trinity Cathedral
next month.
Youth choirs from the different parishes
will try to outdo each other’s interpretations
of Bishop Richard Ellena’s hymn, Glory to
God, which was composed for their new
bishop’s installation.
And in December the young people will
play host to three major youth events.
The biennial Tikanga Youth Exchange
will be held in Suva from December 9-11,
in conjunction with a Raukura, which is
a training programme for senior youth
leaders of the three tikanga.
Immediately following TYE, the Diocese
of Polynesia will host Talanoa Pasefika,
which is a training programme and ‘Talanoa’
session for its own youth leaders.
And on the last day of the weeklong gathering, Sunday, 12th December,
Polynesia will launch its own diocesan youth
year – the theme being “Here I am, Lord –
Send me.”
Lloyd Ashton is Media Officer for this church.

Three major youth
events are coming up in
Polynesia in December.

Page 5

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

TA R A N A K I ’ S S U C C E S S S T O R Y

When you’ve got nothing,
where do you begin? That’s the
question Philip Richardson was
fretting about when he became
the first Bishop in Taranaki.
He’s since learned that God
was already in Taranaki,
preparing the way for what was
about to unfold…
Lloyd Ashton has been finding
out more.

We are the
‘You’ve got a team of
champions here.. The real
question is how can we turn
them into a champion team?’
- Stuart Trundle

Photo inset: At the cutting edge of community:
Peter Barleyman and Philip Richardson.

Page 6

champions
W
hen Philip Richardson
was first tackled about
becoming Taranaki’s
bishop, the idea took him
so much by surprise that he burst out
laughing.
He’s not proud of that reaction.
But perhaps it was understandable.
At the time he was shepherding the
Kotahitanga legislation through the 1998
General Synod, so he had other things
on his mind.
He was also Warden of Selwyn College
at the University of Otago. He’d driven
reform of the student culture there, things
had settled down nicely and he was
heading down the academic path. So
becoming the first bishop in Taranaki?
The first bishop of a place he’d hardly
ever set foot in?
That possibility wasn’t even on his
radar screen.
Of course, we know the idea grew
on him. In fact, it wouldn’t let him go. It
was to do with the challenge of starting

something from scratch, and helping
renew the church in Taranaki. That’s what
got him intrigued.
So he let his name go forward – and
in February the following year, at an
electoral college in Stratford, his intrigue
turned to anticipation. Ordination as the
first Bishop in Taranaki followed on July
10, 1999, at St Mary’s in New Plymouth.
Six months later, he wasn’t laughing.
He was feeling as if he’d been passed the
ball just as Richie McCaw, Brad Thorn and
Kieran Read arrived. Wham. Flattened.
The problem was money. Or rather
lack of it. There was just enough in the
Waikato diocesan pot to pay his wages
and for him to hire a part-time secretary –
and not a cent more.
So he felt he couldn’t get anything
going, because any idea he dreamed up
meant money.
“I found myself feeling very disempowered. All I could do, I felt, was be a
chaplain to struggling congregations.
“I was blind to the potential in front of
me.”

Anglican Taonga

O

ver the years, people have
dreamed big dreams for
Taranaki. Back in the 1840s,
George Selwyn, the first Bishop of
New Zealand, saw Taranaki becoming
a centre for West Coast North Island
Anglican mission, and a diocese with its
own bishop.
He bought the land on which St
Mary’s sits, and St Mary’s did in fact
become a fully-fledged cathedral –
almost 170 years later, in March this
year.
The holdup was because the
settlement of the North Island didn’t
follow the pattern Selwyn had
expected. Frankly, Taranaki suffered on
account of that.
When the constitution of the Anglican
Church in New Zealand was signed in
1857, for example, Taranaki was divvied
up like Africa in the colonial carve-ups
of the 19th century.
The southern half of Taranaki, from
Eltham south, was ceded to the Diocese
of Wellington, while the Diocese of
Auckland took control of the territory
north of Stratford.

Then, in 1926, when the Diocese of
Waikato came into being, it took over that
northern half of Taranaki from Auckland.
In terms of the province’s historical,
geographic and economic integrity, the
partitioning made little sense. So, in the late
1980s, Archbishop Brian Davies – who was
born in Stratford – began to unite Taranaki
under the one Anglican jurisdiction.
He got together with Roger Herfft (who
had followed him as Bishop of Waikato), and
in 1996 an Anglican commission reported
that the southern part of Taranaki should
secede from Wellington and link with the
rest of Taranaki to become a new bishopric
within the Diocese of Waikato.
That’s what happened and, as we’ve
seen, in 1999 Philip Richardson was chosen
as that first Bishop.
In the normal scheme of things, he’d
have been 2IC to the Diocesan Bishop,
David Moxon.
But Bishop David wasn’t looking
for a 2IC in Taranaki. He wanted a full
colleague. So he and Philip began to
speak about a diocesan leadership that
looked like a catamaran – with twin hulls
beneath a single sail. Those twin bishop
arrangements were written into canon law
at the 2008 General Synod.
The meaning of that deal became
clearer in March this year when St Mary’s
was consecrated as a second cathedral
for the diocese (alongside St Peter’s in
Hamilton) – and in May when the General
Synod changed the name of the Diocese
of Waikato to The Diocese of Waikato and
Taranaki.
-----------------------------------------------------So – Philip didn’t lack authority to make
things happen in Taranaki.
He just lacked dollars. In fact, in 2001,
only about a quarter of the parishes and
chaplaincies in Taranaki had enough
income to support normal stipended
ministry.
About then Stuart Trundle sailed into
the picture.
Stuart is the CEO of Venture Taranaki, the
regional development agency. He’s English,
he’s Anglican – and he’s got quite a track
record. He’d led the largest chamber of
commerce in the UK, had been a company
director, an MBA examiner, and had set up
regional development agencies in Poland
and Romania. Earlier in his career, he’d
been a merchant navy officer, and had
served on the QE2.
Stuart Trundle is also an eternal optimist
– and the appointment of a Bishop in
Taranaki was a chance, he felt, to get the

SPRING 2010

church back into the centre of regional life.
“He had this big vision of a bishop
able to really influence a community and a
region,” Philip recalls.
“He claimed that the church could be
a powerful driver of change for good in
the region, and that I was uniquely placed
to lead that change because I didn’t have
political masters. I was a bit frightened by
his enthusiasm, to be honest.”
Those two talked several times – and
eventually, Philip let his frustration show.
So Stuart made him a proposal. Why
don’t you call your troops together for a
day at Venture Taranaki and just see what
comes of it?
“It was a simple day,” Philip recalls.
“We encouraged each of the stipendiary
clergy to talk about their patch. To talk
about their communities.
“At lunchtime Stuart said to me: ‘You’ve
got a team of champions here. The real
question is: how can we turn them into a
champion team?’
“There’s more intellectual horsepower,
and more skill and knowledge of
community here than in any boardroom I
sit in, or any council meeting I go to.
“You’ve got resource to burn. We’ve just
got to think about how to deploy it.’ ”
Later that day, Stuart presented Philip
with a sketch. He was proposing a trust
that would empower the bishop to make
targeted, sustainable interventions to
tackle unmet needs in Taranaki – and,
right there, you have the outline of the
Bishop’s Action Foundation.
But first things first. Some serious
research was needed to identify those
needs.
Research costs money, of course – and
Stuart came to the party here, too. For
every dollar you raise for research, he told
Philip, Venture Taranaki will supply another.
At that point, Philip was thinking about
Catch 22. Because a 100% subsidy on
nothing is still… nothing.
But then, out of the blue, a $15,000
bequest came his way. Add to that the
$15,000 Venture Taranaki subsidy, and they
were in business.
They had the means to commission
Dr Sharon Milne, a researcher at Massey
University’s School of Social Policy and
Social Work, to put Taranaki’s voluntary
sector under her microscope.
Sharon found hundreds of community or
voluntary organisations offering some kind
of service in Taranaki – more than 100 in
Waitara alone.
›› CONTINUED PAGE 8

Page 7

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

TA R A N A K I ’ S S U C C E S S S T O R Y

›› CONTINUED

Action Foundation Charitable Trust, and
began musing about “champions in the
community” he wanted on it.
Philip wrote 25 names on a whiteboard.
He let that list marinate for a year, and settled
on six names: Stuart Trundle, John Young
(then chairman of Kiwi Co-op Dairies and
director of the New Zealand Dairy Board),
Mary Bourke (then long-time Mayor of South
Taranaki), Jim Gibbons (a big name in car
and truck retailing), Gerald Bailey (former
Chancellor of Waikato University, who later
made way for Archbishop David Moxon);
and Bishop Philip himself.
Each one signed on and, in April 2005,
the deed for the Bishop’s Action Foundation
Charitable Trust became law.

But the really sobering thing was this:
within three months of being launched,
around a third of those projects had fallen
over.
There was a crying need, Sharon found,
for an umbrella outfit to build the capacity of
those groups.
••••
Intriguing stuff. And when Philip checked
out that diagnosis with some of the leading
lights on the Taranaki social service scene –
including Simon Cayley, one of the council’s
community development team – it stacked
up.
Those analysts had some reservations
about the church’s neutrality – but no doubts
that something had to be done. Without the
capacity-building injection that Sharon Milne
had described, Taranaki’s voluntary sector
would struggle.
Given that no one else was volunteering
for that job, they said to Philip: go for it. Within
a couple of days, too, Simon Cayley was in
touch. If this foundation gets off the ground,
he told Philip, I’m keen to be part of it.
Philip had lawyers frame up the Bishop’s

he BAF Trustees figured they needed
$360,000 over three years to get going,
and Bishop Philip and Stuart Trundle
made a pitch to Waikato Diocese’s finance
administration council for that amount.
The council’s verdict was this. You can
have $100,000. Total.
On the drive back to New Plymouth Philip
was glum about that $260,000 shortfall –
while Stuart was “whistling away, obscenely
confident.”
Stuart explains: “My view is that if you
have a compelling vision and a compelling
product and service, the money will
mysteriously happen. I don’t know how it
works – it’s a miracle – but it always works.”
He smiles: “I don’t think the church is used
to that model.”
The trustees interviewed four candidates
for the BAF CEO job – and asked them, in the
space of an hour, to write a proposal spelling
out how Taranaki’s voluntary agencies could
be helped.
Simon Cayley was one of those four
candidates. His ideas were good enough for

‘If you have a compelling
vision, product and service,
the money will mysteriously
happen’ - Stuart Trundle

T

him to nail the job – he started in July 2005 –
and good enough, in fact, that they became
the blueprint for Keystone Taranaki.
-----------------------------------------------------Keystone Taranaki is BAF’s answer to
that pressing need to build capacity­to help
parishes, and voluntary and community
groups.
It runs a range of training programmes.
Each year, for instance, it taps regional
and national leaders to deliver low-cost
workshops in New Plymouth, Stratford
and Hawera. The topics vary from year
to year – for instance, BAF offers a course
on governance and management in the
community sector.
It also offers one-to-one support with its
own staff – and it has also hatched a Critical
Friends Programme, modelled on the New
Zealand Business Mentoring Service.
BAF can also help volunteer
organisations to evaluate their own projects,
and to create “a self-assessment tool” so
they can weigh up their strengths, and focus
on areas they need to work on.
Early in the piece BAF also came to
the realisation that it’s tough at the top in
Taranaki, and lonely, too. So they’re big on
leadership development.
Each year they host a leadership seminar
– Archbishop John Sentamu was the key
speaker at this year’s gathering – and local
mayors, school principals, police and clergy
converge to listen to a big name talk about
what being a leader means to them, and to
thrash out issues (eg: Leadership and the
Treaty of Waitangi; The dynamics of high
performance leadership) relevant to the
challenge of leadership in Taranaki.
Quite apart from whatever those regional
leaders gain from the seminar itself, there’s the
chance to build relationships – and to break
down the loneliness of leadership in Taranaki.

journey
Where the

becomes a destination

Page 8

Anglican Taonga

Technology is another area where many
outfits in the voluntary and community field
struggle. They can’t keep up – and they
don’t have the cash to hire consultants. So
they fall behind. Or fall over.
As a result BAF has set up ICT Gateway
(ICT = Information Communication
Technology) to guide these groups across
the digital divide.
Pat Edwards and Kiki Ruakere can help
community and voluntary groups in their
ICT planning and managing, and when it
comes to sourcing hardware they’re pretty
handy, too.
For example, heavy-duty computer-users
such as health boards and the police are
regularly updating their gear, and Pat and
Kiki can sometimes secure that cast-off gear
for a song and set it up for their clients.
Early on, BAF also saw that many top-level
folk working for Taranaki communities had no
training in community development – which
is the discipline of helping communities to
identify their needs and then empowering
them to respond to those needs.
What’s more, there are scant
opportunities to get that training in New
Zealand.
So BAF forged a partnership with the
Auckland University of Technology to
launch a community development training
programme which has been delivered in
Taranaki for the last four years.
So far, about 40 people – from district
councils, health boards, community
agencies and parishes – have graduated
from these courses.

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SPRING 2010

Philip Richardson and the CEO of BAF, Simon Cayley.

Where does church fit?

T

his focus on community
development is well and good
– but what’s it got to do with
church? Everything, says Philip
Richardson.
To see where he’s coming from, we
need to delve into his past.
Philip was accepted for ministry
training before he left Rangitoto College.
He reeled in a BA from Otago University
and had virtually completed his BTheol by
the time he went to St John’s College – but
he was still just 20, three years too young
for ordination.
So the then Bishop of Auckland, Paul
Reeves, teed him up with a scholarship
to spend a few months at Tamil Nadu
Theological Seminary (TTS) in the South
Indian city of Madurai.
Those Madurai months were an eyeopener for a middle-class Kiwi boy.
Regular students at TTS – many of
whom came from privileged families – did
a four-year course that sandwiched formal
theological education with months spent
living among the rural and urban poor.
Philip sampled that life on the margins
– experienced its squalor, its tragedies,
and the humbling generosity of those
who spend their lives in poverty – and it
challenged every element of his Christian
experience.
“I came back to St John’s College,” he
says, “with my life turned upside down.
I found getting back into college life
extremely difficult.”
So when the chance came to help set
up a community house in Mt Taylor, down
the hill from St John’s, Philip was in.
In the 80s, Mt Taylor was one of the
toughest, most deprived housing tracts

in Auckland.
The two years Philip spent living in Mt
Taylor reinforced a lesson he’d learned
at Tamil Nadu – that God’s love is biased
towards those on the margins, “and that love
works from the margins to the centre, rather
than from the centre to the margins.”
He says the Tamil Nadu and Mt Taylor
years also made him see the Gospel “in
extremely practical terms.
“In both those places I began grappling
towards an understanding of just how
holistic, comprehensive and collaborative
mission is.
“It’s not our mission. It’s God’s mission.
The old theological phrase is Missio Dei –
the Mission of God – and God calls us to
take part in that mission.
“And what is that mission? Nothing
less than the redemption of the whole of
creation, the restoration of the whole of
creation.
“Human beings and the whole created
order are wired for relationship with God.
But something’s gone wrong with the
wiring. We resist that relationship.
“God in Christ offers us a way back –
but Christian faith isn’t just about personal
piety. It’s about creation, society, and the
individual. So you can’t just talk about
individual evangelism. You have to talk
about the transformation of society, and the
preservation and restoration of creation
as well.
“You can’t be a Christian and not be
ecologically committed. You can’t be a
Christian and not be socially active. You
can’t be a Christian and not be concerned
about the health, wellbeing and safety of the
individual. You can’t pray the Lord’s Prayer
›› CONTINUED
Page 9

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

TA R A N A K I ’ S S U C C E S S S T O R Y

›› CONTINUED
without being moved to work for a better
society.
“So it’s comprehensive, it’s holistic, and it’s
integrated.
“The Tamil Nadu and Mt Taylor
experiences also showed me how God is
always ahead of us. Sometimes we think
evangelism is about us taking Jesus to the
people. When, in fact, Jesus is way ahead of
us.
“He’s already there, and we find Jesus
reaching up to us, and out to us, from the
most unlikely people, and in the most unlikely
situations. People who wouldn’t claim to be
Christians show us what being Christian is all
about.”
The conviction that Jesus is out in
front, says Philip, is one of the things that’s
sustained him where BAF is concerned, too.
Where do you start when you’ve
got nothing? Well, says Philip, you have
confidence that God is ahead of you. And you
look at the resources already present in the
people and in the wider community.

T

here aren’t that many folk in Taranaki.
Just over 100,000, 70% of whom live in
New Plymouth.
Where the Anglican church is concerned,

the stats are sobering.
Church attendance has been shrinking
for decades – and the people who do come
are getting older. So the church’s financial
base has been shrinking, and its assets are
often liabilities. Many historic churches, for
example, need maintenance and restoration.
In the face of those stats, doing nothing
isn’t an option. Which is why, in November
2005, Philip launched his “Bishop’s
Commission for the Future” and charged it
with coming up with a 10-year plan.
The key thing to flow from that plan has
been a broadening of outlook. Taranaki
Anglicans are thinking and acting regionally,
rather than parochially – and that shift has
released all sorts of mission energies.
How – specifically – has that happened?
Well, the bishopric of Taranaki has been
reconfigured into three rural regions, plus the
city parishes.
Regional deans have been appointed to
each, and it’s their job to drive mission across
the cluster of parishes they serve.
They’re encouraged to work with anyone
– other churches and community groups on
their patch, for example – who shares their
vision of the good of the community.
E-Town (see page 12) is a shining

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example of what’s possible, and that’s just
the start. They’re building a community
house on Stratford parish-owned land, the
old Methodist hall in Hawera is being made
over into a multi-agency centre; and there are
plans for Patea and Waitara, too.
As far as Philip Richardson is concerned,
neither the Commission for the Future nor the
good work that has flowed from it would have
been possible without BAF.
Every step of the way, he says, BAF was
there – helping the parishes think through
what they wanted to do, how they wanted to
go about it, and how they wanted to serve
their communities.
Philip’s respect for BAF is clear: “There’s
not a conversation I have in relation to
parishes or chaplaincies,” he says, “nor a
move I make in the community that doesn’t
involve BAF.
“In other words, it’s the primary resource
that I have to be the Bishop of Taranaki.”
He reckons the Taranaki public have voted
with their feet about the moves the church is
making.
That’s why they turned up in droves – just
about every community leader among them
– for the consecration of St Mary’s. That’s
why the Taranaki Daily News gave massive
coverage of Archbishop John Sentamu’s visit
in the week leading up to that consecration.
“I was staggered by the goodwill shown,”
says Philip, “and I believe that exists because
of the practical way in which the church is
being seen to be concerned for the people of
Taranaki.”
-----------------------------------------------------And the money?
That seems to have taken care of itself, too.
Four years ago, for example, Simon
Cayley put Keystone Taranaki forward to
the Ministry of Social Development. He was
hoping it might qualify for support from their
Community Initiatives Fund.
A couple of weeks later, Simon got an
evening phone call: the MSD was happy to
fund Keystone Taranaki to the tune of $70,000
a year for the next three years.
Since then, BAF has tapped into a wide
range of funding for its various projects. So
much so, that BAF now has a staff of seven
who operate from Tikituterangi House, the
bishopric’s new offices.
But for Simon, there’ll always be
something special about that first call from
the MSD.
“I sat there after that phone call and
thought: Look! We’re going to be all right!”
Lloyd Ashton is Media Officer for this church.
mediaofficer@ang.org.nz

Page 10

Anglican Taonga

Mary Bourke:
picking the right people

M

ary Bourke knows how Taranaki
ticks. She was Mayor of South
Taranaki – which stretches from
just north of Whanganui to just
south of New Plymouth – for five terms.
She stood down at the last local body
elections but still chairs Taranaki’s polytech
council, sits on the district health board
and the TSB community trust – and she’s a
Bishop’s Action Foundation trustee.
She’d met Philip Richardson in 1999, and

SPRING 2010

Lloyd Ashton talks to two of the prime movers
behind the Bishop’s Action Foundation

in the wake of the Central North Island floods
of February 2004, asked him to advise on the
doling out of flood relief money.
She returned the favour when Philip was
seeking feedback about BAF. Later, she
agreed to become a trustee.
Mary believes BAF’s success is largely
down to the people involved. “There’s Philip
himself,” she says. “He’s a go-getter, he’s
approachable, and he’s ‘out there’ – and
there’s Simon Cayley, who is a fantastic
community development man. Their skills are
complementary.”
Handpicked trustees are part of the secret
too, she reckons.
“There’s no doubt about the luxury of
being able to pick your team rather than
having to rely on whatever the vagaries of a
democratic process might throw up.”
Taranaki’s isolation, she says, is one of the
reasons why BAF is needed. “Where social
services are concerned, there’s a principle at
work the world over: the further you get from
the centre, the less important people seem to
become.
“Which is ironic, because the further you
get from the centre, the greater the need for

those services.
“The same principle applies within Taranaki,
too. People in New Plymouth get a much better
service than anybody else around the rest of
the coast.
“I’ve always argued that the foundation
shouldn’t get into work which government
departments should be doing. But we’re talking
about community groups having difficulties
keeping going… we have to fill the gaps.”
Mary says that what appeals to her about
BAF is that it’s about people’s wellbeing.
“Rather than luring bums on to seats, as it were.
“Take the Regional Leaders’ Forum. That’s
about recognizing there are a lot of people in
leading roles, and being in those positions can
be quite lonely.
“So pulling those people together to discuss
leadership with some of the country’s finest
leaders… that’s been amazing.”
“Philip was proposing quite radical reform.
But he introduced it in such a way that people
became quite excited about working on it.
“He identified the issues, and left it up to
the communities to work through those issues
themselves.”

Stuart Trundle:
championing the cause

I

n life, says Stuart Trundle, the CEO of
Venture Taranaki, you’ve got only so much
energy to give.
Invited to lead a planning session
with Taranaki’s clergy 10 years ago, he saw a
group of good-willed, God-minded, highlyintelligent people – whose energy was
seeping away.
They’d become, he says, “overwhelmed
by the business of Christianity, and consumed
with the micro-management of their parishes.
“Within parishes it’s easy to get hung up
on the boiler not working, the photocopier
running out of toner, and the leak in the
gentlemen’s urinal in the church hall.
“So you had these people with masters
and doctorates in theology working incredibly
hard, incredibly long hours, with minimal
resources, attending to these things… and no
longer engaged with strategic leadership of
the region.
“If I go back to my QE2 background, we
were so busy running the lifeboats that we

had forgotten we had 3000 souls on board.”
This misplaced focus, he recalls, meant
the clergy weren’t seeing themselves as a
co-coordinated team – in business terms,
not subsidiaries of a larger group. At that first
meeting he didn’t sense much corporate
pride, either. No one came wearing a dog
collar.
But what emerged was a sense of hope
– a glimpse of an opportunity, under Bishop
Philip’s leadership and with Bishop David’s
support, to make a real difference.
There was still a heap of work to do,
though. “It was all very well appointing a
bishop, but I knew that unless that bishop had
the ability to fire Exocet missiles at challenges
within the community, he’d soon become
frustrated.
“He’d become the regional eunuch, on
the sidelines, watching what’s happening
– and becoming another frustrated, expert
resource.”
The idea for BAF was eventually birthed.

Simon Cayley was appointed soon after that,
and Stuart reckons he could have bowed out at
that point. Instead, he was persuaded to stay on
as a trustee.
“Our role now,” he says, “is to comfort
the executive when they become afflicted
– and to afflict them when they become too
comfortable.
“I do have to stress: it worked because the
first Bishop of Taranaki was somebody who
was willing to listen, instead of saying: ‘Who the
hell is that buffoon – get rid of him!’
“Not only did Philip listen – he heard. And
that’s a rare skill.”

Page 11
-

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

TA R A N A K I ’ S S U C C E S S S T O R Y

At home in E-Town: (from left) Paremokai Moses, Taonganui Marino and Tiaki Edwards.

Angels since day one
Lloyd Ashton discovers
fresh hope on the wild
side of Eltham

Eltham’s kids were
caught in a ‘silent crisis’
– until E-Town joined the
neighbourhood.

Page 12

T

he small Taranaki town of Eltham
wasn’t feeling festive at Christmas
2006. A month earlier, drunken
teens had gone on a letterboxsmashing spree in the town. Someone had
tried to stop them – and been bashed so
badly he’ll spend the rest of his days in a
wheelchair.
Eltham’s kids were caught, an emergency meeting heard, in a “silent crisis.”
Far too many were dropping out
of school, there were unwanted teen
pregnancies and a high rate of sexually
transmitted disease – with nothing
happening to turn that around.
Eltham doesn’t have those problems
on its own, of course. Nor even the fact
that many mums and dads in the town are
shiftworkers who sometimes can’t be there
when their kids need them.
But Peter Barleyman, the new Regional
Dean for Central Taranaki, who had called
that first crisis meeting, wasn’t going to

wash his hands of Eltham’s plight.
He linked with the Bishop’s Action
Foundation, and they asked Waves – a onestop youth health “shop” in New Plymouth
– whether something like that could be set
up in Eltham.
Together, they surveyed the Eltham kids
to find out what they needed, what was
important to them – and how they felt about
the idea of a youth centre.
There was a big thumbs-up for that
scheme.
While that survey was going on, Peter
was also talking with the folk at All Saints’
Eltham.
They were an ageing, dwindling
congregation, going through tough times
of their own. Every month during the past
18 months, they’d buried one of their fellow
parishioners.
How would you feel, Peter asked the All
Saints’ people, if your parish hall doubled
as a youth centre?

We’re all for that, they said. And, to cut a
long story short, that’s what happened: in
2008 E-Town (the kids had called their town
by that name anyway) was born.
So what happens at E-Town?
Every Tuesday after school, droves of
primary and secondary kids drop by. They
play all manner of games – from playstation
to pool; chess to computer games; table
tennis to shooting hoops – and at 4pm they
slam on the brakes for cheese toasties
(or mince on toast; soup and a bun or a
hamburger). Then it’s back to the games till
dinner time.
On Wednesday and Thursday mornings,
E-Town is also open for breakfast. Up to 40
kids – some barefoot, even in the middle of
winter – drop by for that, too.
But food and games don’t begin to
describe the safety net that E-Town is
weaving around those vulnerable kids.
Take Marilyn Chittenden’s contribution,
for example. She’s a nurse practitioner
(qualified to prescribe, in other words) and

thanks to a partnership E-Town has forged
with Ngati Ruanui, Marilyn is in her E-Town
surgery every second Tuesday.
Where the kids might feel whakama
about seeing a GP, they trust Marilyn. She
keeps an eye on their physical, mental and
sexual health, and just as important she
plugs them into the health system.
Then there’s Peter Hokopaura, who drops
in regularly to shoot a few hoops. Peter’s an
ex-policeman, a father of five – and he’s a
Youth Transition Officer.
Which means that if a kid is teetering on
the edge of dropping out of school, Peter
can get alongside them. He makes sure they
don’t disappear, and guides them to a more
secure rung on the ladder.
Above all, Peter and Jan Barleyman are
always on deck with their helpers, always
there with a listening ear.
According to a report that CJ Brown wrote
about E-Town for the Eltham Argus, Peter
and Jan have been “angels since day one.”
BAF has been there from the start, too.

Peter says they’ve supplied a professional
edge when needed. BAF spent months
helping E-Town nut out its procedures
and policies, they’ve brokered the service
contracts, and picked up funding from
corporate supporters like the Taranaki
Electricity Trust.
These days, it seems, everyone is feeling
good about E-Town.
The All Saints’ congregation is connecting
with its community in a way that feels
relevant – and the wider community is
backing E-Town, too. The Lions Club, for
example, has just painted the hall.
But what about the kids? What about their
wellbeing?
Well, there are good signs there, too.
Including reports of a reduction in those
trends mentioned earlier, with some people
saying credit for that should go to E-Town.
And the kids themselves?
They’re voting for E-Town with their feet.
Week after week, in big numbers, they
keep coming back for more.

Education for Ministry
People Ministering to People

A programme of theological education and ministry formation available throughout New Zealand.
EFM provides in-depth theological education that enables all the baptized to study Old and New Testament and Church
History, and better discern their own ministries.
For information about joining or forming a group with a trained mentor in your area, contact:
The National Administrator
Education for Ministry
PO Box 12-046, Wellington
Email:
Website:

befmg@xtra.co.nz
www.efm.org.nz

Page 13

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

FRESH EXPRESSIONS

Uplifting

– but no quick-FX

‘
It’s challenging and
exciting but will require a
change in thinking.’ –
Archdeacon Lawrence Kimberley

Page 14

New approaches to mission at
home are revitalising Anglican
churches and communities
across the UK and look set to
do the same for Aotearoa
New Zealand.
Known as fresh expressions
(FX), these new ways of
engaging people outside the
usual scope of church life
have been picking up speed
as Anglicans break out of their
comfort zones to meet people’s
needs in the midst of their
ordinary lives.

Archbishop Rowan Williams’
Missioner and leader of the
UK fresh expressions team,
Bishop Graham Cray, was at
Lincoln University for a threeday conference in June, when
he shared the foundations and
insights of this new movement
with Anglicans from across the
South Island.
Julanne Clarke-Morris went
along to see what FX is about.

Anglican Taonga

“Amazing!” is how Gillian Swift, regional
support priest for Southland, sums up her
days with Bishop Graham Cray.
“I don’t have the words to describe how
hopeful I felt; it was uplifting!,” she says.
“I felt resourced, I felt engaged in story, I
came home with my head just swimming.
“I have visited fresh expressions in
England, seen them working and talked
with the people, but I had never heard such
deep theological reasoning for being a
mission-shaped church. What an amazing
prophet of a man.”
Like any prophet, though, Bishop Cray
spells out some startling truths: up to
80% of urban English have either never
been church regulars or have intentionally
left, so it’s the old “you come to us”
approach is clearly not working. In light
of this, fresh expressions are not clever
strategies to attract more people on Sunday
morning; they involve a complete mission
reorientation that sends parishioners out to
listen and learn.
The first step in any fresh expression
sees small groups of praying, listening
Christians go out to discern how the
transforming power of God can be released
where people are. In some cases, the
listening phase alone takes several months
or even up to a year.
Fresh expressions form where people
share a neighbourhood, network,
subculture or life stage – in schools,
youth movements, seniors’ study groups,
skateboarder and goth churches, or in
one case a police force network church.
According to Bishop Cray, the key to
reaching the unchurched is to head out and
serve the community first.
Nelson’s Archdeacon for Mission, Mark
Chamberlain, agrees: “Christians need to
Below: Bishop Cray

SPRING 2010

The checklist
According to Bishop Cray, God wants a
thousand flowers to grow. But how do we
know if each flower is really the church?
FX adherents have a list of checks that
should reassure even the most sceptical
of observers.
A true fresh expression must have:
›› authentic worship as the gift at its heart
›› God’s glory as its chief inspiration
›› prayer undergirding all its activities
›› discernment as its key to sharing in
God’s mission
The test at the end is the life in Christ
and quality of discipleship experienced
by its members. How would our inherited
churches measure up to all that?

be confident in their faith and brave enough
to be involved in the community – working
with people of goodwill, not just other
Christians.
“We need to experiment and innovate
and not be too worried if things don’t turn
out. We also need to pray that God’s Spirit
would open doors for ministry.”
Which is why Bishop Cray says ‘go
gently’ in the process of building genuine
Christian discipleship in totally new settings.
By all means use insights and guidelines
from others, he adds, but always have the
word Grace stamped over the top,.
Listeners discerning where to start
should ask, “What is God already
doing here? What is on the hearts of the
community? Where is the pain? Where is
hope needed?” In theological terms, then,
the challenge is to join in the Missio Dei,
God’s own mission in the world, instead of
making human plans and asking God to
bless them.
This approach to mission means that no
one knows what a fresh expression will look
like until it has begun its own life. Quite a
change from the default mission approach
most of us unwittingly hold, which is to
make other Christians in our own image!
With fresh expressions, the Church of
England is bringing its ordinary members
up to speed with a century of cross-cultural
mission praxis from overseas.

For more information about fresh
expressions and for the presentation
notes from the Lincoln conference, go
to http://www.chch.anglican.org.nz/
Resources and select Fresh Mission:
New Anglican Expressions of Church
Conference - Registration Form. A web
search for fresh expressions will lead to
a host of resources including guidelines
for beginning and supporting fresh
expressions.
Julanne Clarke-Morris is Associate Editor of Anglican
Taonga.
julanneclarkemorris@gmail.com

Time and again, experience has proven
that the Gospel best takes root within the
patterns and priorities of the cultures it
encounters. Not to mention that for years
Maori theologians and church leaders have
made this point resoundingly clear in the
context of mission in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Now, in order to reach the unchurched, it’s
the culture of the secular world that we’re
preparing to meet face to face.
All this talk of mission makes immediate
sense to evangelical Anglicans, yet
perhaps surprisingly, some high-profile
fresh expressions have come from AngloCatholics.
In 2009 Canterbury Press published a
book with an introduction by Archbishop
Rowan Williams, entitled Fresh Expressions
in the Sacramental Tradition. Numerous
stories from the UK and North America
show liturgical Anglicans meeting
postmodern spiritual needs through
non-verbal communication and direct
experience of the holy – and drawing
deeply from the wells of Christian art, ritual,
monasticism and contemplative prayer.
At the same time, new urban monastic
communities are engaging in hands-on
social justice as well as joining in the
worship of heaven, harking back to the
origins of the Oxford Movement.
›› CONTINUED PAGE 16
Page 15

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

FRESH EXPRESSIONS

Bex Chapman
Youth Worker, Belfast-Redwood
I’m excited that there
are other ways of
doing church, not
just traditional. I liked
the idea of looking at
what the community
needs (not what we think they need)
and meeting people where they are.
I’m practical, and today’s stories got me
thinking what can our young people do
for our community that’s hands-on, that’s
not preaching but doing. From working
in the mental health system I know that
actions speak louder than words. If you
go in not preaching, but trying to be
Christ-like in everything you do, people
know they’re being treated differently.
Andrew Mcdonald
Priest Assistant, Fendalton,
Christchurch
I can tell lights are going
on for people all around
as the bishop speaks.
For me, a lot of this is
intuitive. I joined the
Anglican Church with
the sense it was prepared to invest a lot
of goodwill and support in new ways of
being church, without abandoning the
rhythms and tools of the historic church.
I think as you move away from studying
theology the lenses get banged around
and put out of focus – in these few days
Bishop Graham has brought things back
into focus, done some lens work. We’ll
be able to go back and have some great
energy for new conversations.
Arona Tusenga
Presbyterian Ministerial Intern,
Auckland
What stands out for
me is that mission can
be done by taking the
church to the people,
not just by the method
of making people
want to come. It’s costly, it takes time,
it needs patience, and these kinds
of ministries have to be long-term.
They also take courage (to handle the
failures) and persistence, but the bottom
line is it can be done, as in the case of
the skateboarders. They went to the
skateboarders, heard what concerned
them, helped them and made a real
difference, because they really listened
and learned what those kids cared about
and needed.

Page 16

Experience has proven that the Gospel best
takes root within the patterns and priorities of the
cultures it encounters.
›› CONTINUED

The catchline for sacramental fresh
expressions is “ancient faith, future
mission,” which like the emerging church,
combines the best of ancient traditions with
the best of contemporary technologies.
The Ven Lawrence Kimberley,
Archdeacon of Pegasus and Vicar of
Opawa-St Martins in Christchurch, is
impressed with the grounding of fresh
expressions in Trinitarian doctrine.
However, he has practical questions about
sacramental forms of fresh expressions.
“There seems to be a vision of
numerous small ecclesiastical communities
in local subcultures existing alongside the
inherited tradition of a geographical area
served by a central church,” Lawrence says.
“It’s challenging and exciting but will
require a change in thinking. The hard
work will be in ensuring that nothing is
diminished, that it is the universal catholic
faith that is being nurtured and celebrated
in these dispersed groups.”

B

ishop Cray was realistic about
these concerns at the Lincoln event
and took pains to show they are not
about dumbing down,
“We’re not interested in rewriting the
Gospel to make it fit,” he said. “Neither
are we interested in leaving out. We are
profoundly interested in translation.”
Amidst the infectious enthusiasm for
fresh expressions, there’s a need for

caution. FX is not a quick-fix for falling
numbers, nor is it to be embraced simply
because it’s new; the movement is part
of a broader call to costly, years-long
incarnational mission.
Social action plays a vital role in fresh
expressions, which are essentially outwardlooking and never self-serving. Bishop Cray
tells of one outreach in a violent council
estate in Manchester, where a decade of
druglord control had reduced tenants to
inmates and their neighbourhood to a tip.
Hope dawned after a call to local police
from the Soul Survivor youth festival (an
English fresh expression) saw a thousand
young Christians spend 10 days of their
summer holidays cleaning up the estate.
They removed 280 tonnes of rubbish,
tidied 200 gardens, created a park, cleaned
the streets and in two weeks turned the
whole estate around. Neighbours began
to relate to each other and form alliances,
instead of being separated by piles of
rubbish and an attitude of fear.
The local tenants’ association then found
the confidence to order the druglord’s
eviction and, following the tidy-up, crime
statistics for the estate fell by 47% and
stayed down for five years.
After the first four days of the clean-up,
one tenant asked a team member working
on his garden, “What are you guys doing
this for anyway? Are you Christians or
something?”

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Anglican Taonga

Fresh expressions differ from other
innovations in their positive attitude
to what’s called “inherited church”.
Those beginning fresh expressions are
less likely to be people who have run
out of patience for an earlier form of
church. In practical terms, this makes
fresh expressions stronger and more
sustainable, because they can rely on
the inherited church’s support – for
people, prayer, theological foundations,
money and professional oversight.
According to Susan Howarth, youth
and families minister for Nativity Church
in Blenheim, this is vital.
“Bishop Cray was very realistic
about the support fresh expressions will
need. They must be fluid, because once
they are under way you have to be able
to take them where they go.
“They will generate unforeseen
challenges. So leaders need to be able
to help problem solve and to support
without controlling.”
Susan points out that in England all
ordinands now study the theology and
practicalities of fresh expressions. She
believes it will take this country some
time to come up to speed with the kind
of leadership that’s needed.
“People in the Anglican hierarchy
will have to be willing to allow the kind
of diversity fresh expressions bring. We
need leaders who can offer courageous
leadership – who can help lay people
find their gifts and vision, whether it’s
a passion for music or BMX – and then
stay in dialogue with them and resource
them as the ministry unfolds, without
standing in the way.”

SPRING 2010

A fresh take on SCM
Julanne Clarke-Morris

I

t turns out I came to faith through
a fresh expression of church.
The term fresh expressions didn’t
exist when I joined the Student
Christian Movement, but reflecting
on Bishop Cray’s words I realise all
the hallmarks of this movement were
there.
A cynical atheist, I grew up the
unchurched child of parents who had
rejected the church along with their
Sunday school faith. I spent my first
20 years in an environment closed to
organised religion and the institution
of the church. So, how on earth did I
end up following Jesus?
Traditional evangelism didn’t work
for me – when evangelists visited our
school assembly, their testimonies
gave me the impression that faith
was a rehabilitation programme for
drug addicts and dropouts, which
excluded me.
The local Baptist holiday
programme didn’t work either – I got
the message that unless I accepted
Jesus into my heart (a creepy concept
that left me cold) I was damned.
I got there slowly and by my own
volition, not because someone made
it seem popular or couched the
same words in different media. What
brought me to faith was meeting with
peers I could relate to, and engaging
with ideas and issues I cared about

already.
In SCM I found people who cared
about justice, integrity and holistic
living. It offered an encounter with
people and experiences that could
serve as spiritual resources for my
life – without my being grabbed and
pinned down to something I didn’t
understand or want.
There was no dotted line to sign
on and no secret plot to make me into
what others were. When I turned up I
was immediately valued as someone
with a contribution to make, who
would enrich the discussion, rather
than being seen as a “not yet” person
or trainee.
In many ways these are the
qualities of fresh expressions. FX
is a form of mission that doesn’t
assume it has all the answers. First off,
Christians heading out to form a fresh
expression have to make a habit of
listening, with the desire to learn what
it is that people really value, need and
want so that they can discern what the
Gospel can offer them.
The path to true discipleship,
where we are challenged by the
Gospel, comes a lot further down the
track.
Bishop Cray struck a chord with
me when he said, “Imagine if we went
out and instead of telling people what
they were doing wrong, we helped
them feel good about themselves.”

Whether it’s an L.Th for potential ministry, or a paper or
two for your personal interest and knowledge, we can fit
serious part-time courses around your lifestyle.

he came, she saw, and she
conquered – but only her disciples.
That’s my immediate impression
of Katharine Jefferts Schori’s first
Downunder tour at the end of June, surely the
most ambiguous primatial visit in the history
of this church.
In case you don’t know, Katharine Schori
is Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church
of the USA, which has upset a good number
of Anglicans by defying a Communion-wide
moratorium on the election of bishops in
same-sex relationships.
Even the impeccably mannered
Archbishop of Canterbury is hot under the
collar over the recent election of a lesbian
priest, Mary Glasspool, as assistant bishop
in Los Angeles – with the result that TEC
has been deprived of a voice in ecumenical
encounters on faith and order.
Bishop Schori therefore has to choose
carefully which doors to knock on whenever
she travels abroad, despite the fact that she is
still technically a bishop and primate in good
standing.
Conservative provinces – especially in
Africa – have always been no-go areas for
women bishops, let alone liberal Americans.
But now even Western provinces are growing
cagey about their closeness to TEC for fear
that the global fallout will rub off on them and
Page 18

contaminate their own houses.
This accounts for why Katharine Schori’s
six-day visit to these shores was shrouded
with caution. Was it an official visit? Or
simply a holiday tacked on to an Australian
encounter? No one in authority here
was saying early on – although bloggers
speculated wildly.
Some argued that TEC anticipated being
thrown out of the Communion, and that the
Schori tour was therefore part of a strategy
to cosy up to friends and build an alternative
network of liberal provinces.
Others interpreted her presence here as a
clear statement of New Zealand’s theological
sympathies, and warned that we were
courting the same ostracism that TEC faced.
Well, midway through the tour someone
finally popped the question to Bishop Schori
– and she responded that it was an official
visit, following a personal invitation from a
senior churchman some time back.
However, don’t read liberal conspiracy
into that. A goodwill visit to at least one other
Anglican province every year happens to
be part of the Presiding Bishop’s regular
schedule, she told a group in Christchurch.
And this year New Zealand came to the top
of the list.
The fact remains, however, that she arrived
at an awkward moment for this church – just

as we were convening a national hui to flesh
out the scriptures on human sexuality. The
texts that divide, no less (see pages 28 & 29).
Initially it was thought that Bishop Schori
might even contribute to the hui, but this
idea was shelved amid fears that she would
inflame an already nervous gathering.
There were also rumours of protest action
by conservative clergy – especially if she
was given an elevated platform to promote
the liberal cause. So her itinerary was
confined to carefully managed forums in
Auckland and Christchurch, plus a lecture
at the Canterbury Women’s House and a
presentation at Canterbury University.

O

ne man who did relish Katharine
Schori’s presence was Bishop John
Gray, her host for the Christchurch
leg of the visit. His little community of Te
Hepara Pai was lavish in its hospitality, and
Bishop John took obvious delight in helping
to discomfit her detractors.
Bishop Schori was equally lavish in
her praise of this church, making a brave
stab at Te Reo and saying that our threetikanga model “has something to teach the
Communion.” I guess she believes the same
of TEC, although she was modest enough not
to push it.
What she did stress about TEC was its

Anglican Taonga

missionary credentials, dating back to its
beginnings as a missionary society.
“We’re seen as a church that causes
trouble in the Communion,” she acknowledged. “But we can’t be what we’re not.
“We know that some parts of the
Communion don’t agree with our views on
sexuality. We’re still working out such issues
ourselves.
“Lifelong, faithful, monogamous
relationships matter to us. But we’re also
concerned with issues of poverty, black
self-determination, Millennium Development
Goals… We’re focussed clearly on mission!”
Surprisingly, her Christchurch forum
drew just a handful of clergy – and then only
those sympathetic to TEC. Whatever you
might think of TEC, it’s still a highly resourced
and generous province with branches in 16
countries, not to mention projects in poorer
nations of the Communion.
So, why is there so much antagonism
towards it?
The obvious answer is TEC’s disregard
of the Communion moratorium. Except
that Bishop Schori doesn’t believe that TEC
has broken it. Well, not in canonical terms
anyway.

SPRING 2010

‘Lifelong, faithful, monogamous relationships
matter to us.’ – Katharine Jefferts Schori
“We haven’t done anything in synod
to violate the moratoria,” she told the
Christchurch forum, arguing then that under
TEC statutes she was powerless to stop a gay
consecration anyhow.
“We say in our canons that gays and
lesbians are equal in discernment… My
canonical responsibility is just to order the
consecration.”
The real antipathy to TEC stemmed from
“loss of power,” she added. “White men no
longer rule…”
Some in the audience struggled to see the
connection, wondering whether the answer
also involved long-standing prejudices
towards “the ugly American.” But she was
already off on another question – about
the abandonment of shared disciplines,
especially in worship.
“We live in anxious times, so people revert
to holding the line,” she said. “Pastoral care of

anxiety is an issue… There has to be a pullback to incarnate community.”
Most of the audience must have agreed
with all of what she said, because the forum
finished up without a dissenting voice.
And thereby hangs perhaps the biggest
disappointment of the Schori tour, expressed
to me by a leading evangelical.
Did we actually miss an opportunity for
dialogue? he mused. Somewhere during
the visit, a small group of evangelicals would
have appreciated the chance to sit privately
with her and question TEC’s stance.
Having seen Katharine Schori front up,
I’m sure she too would have relished such an
encounter – and given as good as she got.
Physically, she looks to be as formidable as
a runner bean, but those in the know say she
has a spine like a steel waratah.
Next time, we might be brave enough to
put that to the test.

internal gardens. There are two new easy access
gardens - one has a soothing water feature which
adds to the tranquil nature of the facility.

The hospital is staffed with registered nurses,
and a charge nurse who co-ordinates the service
provision and staffing.

The new hospital rooms are fully self-contained
with large ensuites that are bright and spacious.
Each room has a wardrobe, comfortable chair
and electronic hospital beds. The rooms vary
in size but there is plenty of space for personal
pieces of furniture and keepsakes.

In addition to the 10 new purpose built rooms,
the complex also has a new lounge, new carpets,
a spacious dining room and service kitchen,
along with extra space for people to sit and read
or meet with friends and relatives. The only thing
left to be done is the refurbishment on the last
few rooms, which should be completed within
the next few weeks.

Residents have access to a hairdresser, a large
print library, regular entertainment and activities,
laundry services and a chapel.

The private and communal rooms are light and
airy and have been designed to ensure ample
natural light, with large windows and doors to the

Manager
Cheryl
Robinson
anticipates
considerable demand for the hospital beds as
the elderly population continues to increase.

Cheryl Robinson, Manager

tel 06 872 8931

Waiapu House Aged Care facility, providers
of high quality elderly care, have extended its
Danvers Street hospital facilities with the addition
of another 10 beds, and renovations are nearly
finished.

|

|

There is a true village atmosphere with a
community feel at Waiapu House. The aged care
facility and retirement village has 18 chalets, 13
independent living apartments, 42 rest home
beds and 32 hospital beds all set in spacious
grounds among beautiful gardens with plenty of
indoor/outdoor flow.

WH 9043

Waiapu House renovations nearly complete

email cheryl.robinson@waiapuhouse.co.nz
Page 19

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

‘I saw the Lord sitting upon a
throne, and his train filled the
temple…and the temple was
filled with smoke’ – Isaiah 6

Page 20

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

Craufurd Murray fires up a
childhood passion for railways – and
learns that clergy have a tradition of
letting off steam

A full head

of steam
A
passing steam train recently
shattered the quiet of our
parish eucharist with a huge
blast on its whistle. This
delighted the Sunday school
class which had gathered outside to watch.
It was a winter excursion to Arthur’s
Pass, powering through the village on rails
made in Workington, where, curiously, I was
once a curate and played hockey for the
steel works.
The congregation’s faces lit up at
the sound. Many of us belonged to the
generation when steam ruled the tracks,
and carry memories of country lines long
abandoned as unprofitable – despite the
frequent championing by clergy of those
designated to be axed (amusingly portrayed
in the 1953 comedy film, The Titfield
Thunderbolt). In some cases, disused lines
have been revived in recent years as cycling
and walking tracks.
Steam trains featured prominently in
my childhood in the north of England. I
remember going for family picnics to watch
trains on the main line. A favourite place was
the view of the water pick-up, from troughs
between the rails, as the double-headers
approached the climb to Shap summit.
Excess water always spilled on to hot pipes
under the tenders, and the two engines and
leading carriage were shrouded in clouds
of steam.

Another favourite was along a rough
dirt road beside a stone bridge. The 19th
century railway builders included beautiful
stone bridges so that farmers retained
ready access to fields across the lines. We
would lean over the parapet and wave to
the fireman and driver. The only hazard
was the risk of smuts in our eyes, as smoke
puffing furiously from the funnel hit the arch
below us.
Also, we were never impatient when
level crossing gates closed the road. The
delay to traffic meant we would see a train
pass at close quarters. (It’s charming that
the road traffic sign in New Zealand for a
railway crossing still shows the image of a
steam locomotive.)
I became fully aware of my appreciation of
the majesty of steam when I went with great
anticipation to see one of the first diesels
pulling a mainline express but returned
home utterly disappointed. Even the one
photograph I took felt like wasted film.
My childhood coincided with the
publication of the adventures of Thomas the
Tank Engine by Wilbert Awdry, a Church
of England clergyman. The Three Railway
Engines was the first to be printed, in 1945,
and Thomas the Tank Engine appeared the
following year.
For the 65th anniversary this year, a
special edition has been issued. The books
began as stories for Awdry’s son when he
›› CONTINUED
Page 21

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

›› CONTINUED

Christmas. Our own set had a locomotive
named ‘Sir Nigel Gresley’, after its
designer who was one of several renowned
locomotive engineers who were sons of
clergy. This scale model was a streamlined
A4 class, the same as ‘Mallard’ (now in the
National Railway Museum at York) which set
the world speed record for a steam engine
in 1938 (202.58km/h).
Our enthusiasm for railways led to the
construction in the garden of an extensive
O-gauge layout, and my brother and I were
among the first members of the Hornby
Railway Company – I still have my badge!
I’m not sure how far this goes to establish
my credentials for writing on the close
affinity that many Anglican clergy seem to
have with steam engines, but that is the nub
of this article. I have only once ridden on the
footplate of a steam locomotive, and it was a
memorable experience.
One of my churchwardens, when I was
first appointed a vicar, had been Managing
Director of the Vulcan Foundry – locomotive
builders with a great history – and he was
always interested, and I think amused, at the
number of clergy who were keen railway
enthusiasts and devotees of steam.
The bishop of the neighbouring
diocese at the time was Eric Treacy,
a noted railway photographer since
the 1930s. He had the nickname of
“the railway bishop”, and the national
team trains are essentially to do with
railway museum has some 12,000 of his
transporting people, but a clear link
photographs in its archives.
can be made between physical (outer)
A frequently used quotation to
and spiritual (inner) journeying. The
provide
humorous authentication for the
steam locomotive – bearing a name we
clergy-steam
relationship is from Isaiah
know – provides power that can be heard
6: “I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne,
and felt and seen, and it energizes the
and his train filled the temple…and the
whole train to move. The locomotive thus
represents the Holy Spirit, who animates
temple was filled with smoke.” Later in
and draws the church on its pilgrimage.
that same book (22:19 A.V.) we read: “I
The journey, done in the company
will drive thee from thy station…” But
of others, is a purposeful yet mixed
my own train travel is best reflected
experience. It involves going through
by Psalm 16:6 (R.S.V.): “the lines have
a varied landscape with constantly
fallen for me in pleasant places…”
changing aspects – winding along fertile
Such imaginative and distorted
valleys, bridging ravines and rivers and
use
of scripture, however, provides no
other obstacles, becoming enclosed in
justification
for any clergy fascination
dark tunnels, experiencing griminess,
with steam. From time to time, ‘Letters
stopping to refuel, disembarking at
to the Editor’ columns have offered
various stations, diverting down branch
lines, encountering different gradients,
various fanciful ideas, most of which
occasionally losing traction, going
deserve to be shunted into a siding.
through shadowy cuttings, being faced
Some writers have linked part
with summits to climb – in order to reach
of the appeal to the vast cathedralthe destination. This, from a Christian
like Victorian railway stations. A
perspective, is not the end of the line,
few of these remain, although no
only a terminus.

contracted measles at the age of 2, and
continued afterwards as regular bedtime
stories.
My father, also a clergyman, used to tell
my brother and me bedtime stories about
a steam engine called Leonard, which laid
its own tracks as it went. My daughters were
not subjected to further instalments, as they
heard about the Little Fluffy Owl!
One of my father’s last trips, however,
was to take a small granddaughter on
the preserved steam railway close to his
home. In a valley nearby was a narrowgauge railway, much travelled by Awdry,
inspiring Small Railway Engines (1967). One
of Awdry’s close clergy friends, who had
built a 2ft-gauge railway around his rectory
garden, appeared in The Railway Series as
the “Fat Clergyman”. His books are still very
popular, and some years after he stopped
writing his son continued with new titles.
The Rev Edward Beal (a Church of
Scotland minister) was the “father” of OOgauge railway models, and boxed train sets
were always among the most prized gifts at

Journeys
S

Page 22

St Pancras Station.

longer bristling with steam. Isambard Brunel
planned Paddington Street Station in London
as “a cathedral in a cutting”. Fortunately,
visitors can still see the grandeur of St
Pancras and Liverpool Street Stations.
I once corresponded with Sir John
Betjeman about a particular example of
church architecture, but he showed himself
equally passionate about railways and
without his action both of these magnificent
structures would probably have been lost.
There’s a bronze sculpture of him at St
Pancras, a station designed by Sir George
Gilbert Scott, whose father was a clergyman.
Scott was also architect of ChristChurch
Cathedral in the South Island, so it’s hardly
surprising that the Gothic style of St Pancras
has strong religious overtones..
I’ve often wondered what inspired the
designers of the impressive crest for the
Highland Railway Company, as their insights
could have provided a very different
interpretation. Against the background of an
eagle (the symbol of St John the Evangelist)
two smaller crests are superimposed, one
with the Lamb of God holding the flag of St
Andrew, the other a crucifix.
There’s also a sense in which the
undeniable gracefulness of a locomotive
with a full head of steam speaks of our call to
discipleship. It displays the life-giving beauty
of controlled and harnessed strength, and in
this respect makes direct connections with
the third Beatitude, “Blessed are the meek”.
Perhaps, though, the reason many clergy
are passionate about steam is much simpler:
for them it is an interest of signal delight!
Canon Craufurd Murray is a retired priest living at
Waddington, on the mainline from Christchurch to the
West Coast.
craufurd@xtra.co.nz

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

please
By Megan Blakie

Your eco-tips,

R

ubbish-free couple Waveney
Waugh and Matthew Luxon, who
captured headlines in 2008 for
setting themselves a year-long
target of not creating any landfill waste,
have revamped their website and want
people to send in their eco-friendly ideas.

Matthew says they’re happy to
receive practical tips and advice that
will help others to shop wisely and avoid
unnecessary packaging and waste.
Information can be emailed via the website
www.rubbishfree.co.nz.
“We really want the guide part of
the website to become more and more
detailed,” Matthew says. “Currently there
are about 85 topics, but we want to
keep adding more – from people
sending us their suggestions
and ideas – so that it gets
really comprehensive. We’d
like to have a thousand
topics.
Tips and information
are listed alphabetically
by subject as well
as under categories
relating to the home,
office, garden, and
general information.

The website also now has a small on-line
shop that offers many household items the
environmentally friendly couple sourced
during their rubbish-free year. Bamboo
toothbrushes are just one of the items
available.
The couple, who formerly attended
Holy Trinity in Avonside, Christchurch, are
now living in Auckland. Waveney hopes
to do more waste consulting and Matthew
works in palliative care at the North Shore
Hospice. They are currently house-sitting
and haven’t settled on a ‘home’ parish, says
Matthew.
Visitors to the Nelson Eco Show in late
August had the opportunity to meet the
couple and hear about their experiences.
Megan Blakie is a Christchurch writer specialising in
green issues.
kennett_blakie@hotmail.com

-

Page 23

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

Jim White takes issue with current trends in the
‘training’ of priests

W

hat makes for a good priest?
Or maybe you prefer the
term minister, or pastor,
or preacher, or padre?
Whatever. What do you look for in the
person who will preach the gospel, preside
at the table, and sit by your dying mother’s
bed? The fact is there’s a host of (mis)
understandings about what we are looking
for these days and no single recipe will
produce the right answer.
I offer these reflections on the training of
such people, not just because it’s the role I
am entrusted with by the church, but also to
honour a fine priest, friend and mentor, the
Rev Michael Houghton, who was baptized
in 1929, ordained priest in 1955, and died
in 2010.
The pressure is on theological colleges
to do a better job of producing priests!
We have to do more relevant training and
train for whatever the current trend is at the
moment. Yet, at the risk of being thoroughly
misunderstood, let me say I don’t really
believe in it. ‘Training,” that is.
You train monkeys, dogs and seals – but
not priests. Rather, priesthood is formed in
a person. I am enormously grateful for the
companionship of Michael Houghton and
many others who have been part of my
own formation as a priest. I seek to be part

of the formation of priests and I am deeply
suspicious of this or that current trend in
‘clergy training.’
This doesn’t mean that I am not
interested in current and changing context.
On the contrary, I think we should be deeply
interested in the politics and culture that we
find ourselves living in.
I wish we had more time to watch
films, listen to music, read the newspaper,
argue politics, and so on. I believe God is
interested in culture and politics. However,
I’m reminded of a recent comment by
Walter Brueggeman:
I heard a rabbi say not long ago that
Christian pastors have ruined the life of
a rabbi because the rabbi is a scholar
and a preacher but Christian pastors are
social workers and therapists and budget
managers and now people in his synagogue
expect him to be like that. Preachers have to
decide what the main tasks are, and practise
enormous self-discipline about not being
drawn away to do the things that belong to
the ministry of word and sacrament.1
Brueggeman goes on to say,
If we are to bring a word from elsewhere
we have to live, to a certain extent, elsewhere.
This notion of “a word from elsewhere,”
which in other places he calls “a word from

What lies
behind the
You train monkeys, dogs
and seals – but not priests.
Rather, priesthood is
formed in a person.

Page 24

colla

otherwise,” seems to be an essential point
of difference for those engaged in ordained
ministry. Otherwise, why not just ask students
heading towards ordination to do, say, a
social work degree and be done with it?
I’m reminded of one of my first cars.
(It probably doesn’t do to mention the
maker’s name – they might be the muchneeded sponsor for this magazine!) My
car had a big sporty exhaust system and
smart mag wheels and tyres that were
worth more than the rest of the car. But the
car was all show and no go. It had nothing

real under the bonnet.
I fear that current pressure on the church
to respond to the crisis it faces (in a word,
‘decline’) is forcing us to look for quick-fix
solutions, and the first place to apply these
solutions is in ‘training for the ministry.’ But
such an approach can easily result in all
show and no go. That’s to say, a singular lack
of depth or real substance in our ordinands.
Currently, the flavour of the month is
“emerging church” and “pioneering
ministry.” These are good and important
developments and I’m actually quite excited

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

Monica Furlong:
I want priests
who dare to be...
In 1960, writer Monica
Furlong (1930-2003) gave the
following address to a group of
ordinands at Durham. Despite
the language of the day, her
remarks still speak profoundly
to the vocation of priest:

C

ar?

by them. We have to repent, for instance,
of our reliance on an ‘attractional model’ of
church that just lies in wait for the world to
come to worship.
At St John’s College we are working
on programmes that will educate for and
support these developments. But I’m
certain that our best students could be
faithful, productive and even “successful”
in these new developments, with only
minimal preparation. They would need
the same support as anyone else but they
already have all the important ‘deep stuff ‘ –

knowledge and love of God, others and self
– that’s necessary if they are not to founder
on rocky and dry ground.
I’m confident that the best among our
graduates will be able to turn their hand
to pretty much any plough and any field
that God calls them to serve in. That’s
because they already have the right kind
of depth in their relationship with God,
enough ‘learning’ and, more importantly,
an enquiring and discerning heart that will
have them reading and learning throughout
their ministry.
This work, the formation of these kinds
of individuals, is critical. (It’s important to
stress individuals, not clones. David could
not wear Saul’s armour, and we all find our
own individual way of being priest, pastor,
preacher.)
We have to educate clergy in every way

lergymen are in for a
growing loneliness, of being
misunderstood. I suggest
that this will only be endurable if they
expect this, understand the reasons for
it, and do not cast too many envious
glances over their shoulders at the
circumstances of their predecessors.
I am clear what I want of the clergy.
I want them to be people who by
their own happiness and contentment
challenge my ideas about status, about
success, about money, and so teach
me how to live more independently of
such drugs.
I want them to be people who can
dare, as I do not dare, and as few of my
contemporaries dare, to refuse to work
flat out (since work is an even more
subtle drug than status), to refuse to
compete with me in strenuousness.
I want them to be people secure
enough in the value of what they are
doing to have time to read, sit and
think, and who can face the emptiness
and possible depression which often
attack people when they do not keep
the surface of their mind occupied.
I want them to be people who have
faced this kind of loneliness and have
discovered how fruitful it is, as I want
them to be people who have faced the
problems of prayer.
I want them to be people who
can sit still without feeling guilty, and
from whom I can learn some kind
of tranquillity in a society which has
almost lost the art.
It may be true that it is only in so
›› CONTINUED page 26

Page 25

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

›› CONTINUED
far as the clergy start by exploring
their inner loneliness and its relation to
Christian belief that all their hard work
is going to reach others who, for one
reason or another, are alone, and so
begin to heal our society.
If they do not begin from a vast
clearing of quietness around the
offering of worship, a quietness in
which they can discover who they are
and so enter into genuine relationships
with others, then they are indeed
second-rate social workers, and it were
better that they were swept away.
But I have a great hope that the
clergy will rise to this challenge
as historically they have risen so
admirably to others.
From here I want to suggest that
the clergyman’s great strength will be
the fact that he has no strength except
the strength of love. He is closer to
Christ than he has been for centuries
because, like Christ, he has so few
defences against the world.
Without any certainty that it is going
to be appreciated or understood he
goes out to other people, able only
to offer his relationship with God, his
longing to help, to love and to heal. He
is prepared to be vulnerable, to make
a fool of himself in a way which only the
Christians still attempt.

Page 26

we can imagine. But we also have to start
somewhere, and a good grounding in the
basics of scripture and doctrine is vital. At
the most basic level it’s about knowing
‘our story.’
But we still have to learn the true art of
forming priests who, using Barth’s famous
image, can hold the Bible in one hand and
the newspaper in the other and reflect
deeply about God’s will and Christ’s
way right now. This reflective theological
practice certainly begins in teaching
students how to read and understand
– both Scripture (and doctrine and
tradition) and the newspaper. This is done
adequately enough in most theological
degrees and programmes.
On another level, though, formation for
this task is an art at least as much as it is
science. Moreover, the real artist in this
matter is God. Good priests are walking
sacraments – a term coined by Austin
Farrer in the middle of last century but still
worthy of further attention.
Like other sacraments, priests are
formed by intentional human acts –
preparation, setting aside, and so on – and
the grace of God that comes as answer to
faithful prayer. For this reason I worry more
if some students don’t turn up to chapel than
if they fail an exam (90% of the marks in
prayer life come through showing up!).
We make a big mistake here at St John’s
by calling just a fraction of the programme

Walter Brueggeman: “We have to live elsewhere.”

‘Ministry Formation.’ At the moment
Ministry Formation is a weekly smallgroup experience where the students do
integrative learning. But the fact is that all
we engage in at college is formation for
ministry, not just that one period each week.
When, by the grace of God, the whole
package works we make (or reveal?)
priests who will be women and men of
God first and, out of that being in Christ,
do the tasks of faithful ministry for today
and tomorrow.
Rev Jim White is Dean of the College of the Southern
Cross in Auckland.
1. Brueggeman, W. http://www.workingpreacher.org/
preachingmoments.aspx?video_id=12

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

Lloyd Ashton profiles the woman appointed to oversee St
John’s College in Auckland over the next two years.

Hand of experience
at the helm of

St John’s College

T

he person hired to get St John’s
College back on track is a former
secondary school principal who
has built a reputation for “fixing”
schools in crisis.
Gail Thomson was installed as
Commissioner on August 11, after a
commission headed by Sir Paul Reeves
found aspects of the college dysfunctional.
She is directly accountable to Te
Kotahitanga, with all the powers of a CEO,
and will head the college until General
Synod 2012 when a principal may be
appointed.
Mrs Thomson was Principal of
Auckland’s Diocesan School for Girls
from 1993-2003, and built the school
roll from 1000 to 1600 girls – the largest
independent school in the country.
She set up an educational consultancy
after that, and now regularly helps schools
in strife.
Some of her experiences as school
commissioner seem pertinent to the task
she faces at St John’s.
For example, she’s the commissioner of a
major South Auckland college that has three
schools – primary, middle and senior – on
one campus and governed by one board.

When she was called in, the three heads
of those schools were barely speaking to
one another.
“We’ve now got positive relationships
and a shared vision,” she says. “So this
three-in-one scenario is not new to me.”
Had it not been for a family tragedy, Gail
Thomson might not have entered the school
rescue business.
She resigned from Dio in 2003 because
her daughter, living in the South Island,
was ill.
“I had to choose whether to stay and
look after 1600 girls, or to support family,”
she recalls. “I chose family.
“Following the loss of our daughter I
began to think Where to from here? I’d
built up a lot of educational skills over
many years, so that’s when I set up my
consultancy.”
One of her greatest strengths is the
ability to work with people in conflict. “If
you get people offside to start with, it’s very
difficult to make change,” she says. “But if
you get people wanting to be part of the
change… then you’re making really good
progress.
“People are very apprehensive
when you go into these roles. That’s

Above: Gail Thomson is commissioned at the college
eucharist. The sentence for the day, 2 Corinthians 5:17,
seemed particularly apt: “So if anyone is in Christ, there
is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see,
everything has become new.”

understandable. They don’t know you,
so you’ve got to gain their trust and
confidence in your ability.
“Also, I know little about how the college
works. So I need people to talk freely with
me, so I get the full picture.”
Te Kotahitanga’s plan to turn St John’s
around will proceed on two fronts.
Paul Gilberd, a business development
consultant (and son of Bishop Bruce
Gilberd), has been hired to draw up a
strategic plan for the college. He presented
the first draft to Te Kotahitanga on the day of
Mrs Thomson’s commissioning.
“My first job,” she says, “will be to
discuss and finalise the strategic plan with
Te Kotahitanga – and then I’ll put an action
plan into place, which will show how we’re
going to move to those objectives.”
Lloyd Ashton is Media Officer for this church.
mediaofficer@ang.org.nz

efore the July Hermeneutical Hui I
was not convinced that Scripture
really, really matters to our church
in synod or conference mode. Now
I’m convinced otherwise.
I heard people at the hui saying that
Scripture is central to our life together, it’s
not going to go away, and we have to reckon
with it. Sure, a distinctive commitment to the
‘authority of Scripture’ remains a preserve of
evangelicals. But the hui drew us from across
the spectrum of theologies and tikanga on
to the common ground of taking Scripture
seriously. Difference in interpretation was
present, but so was a common commitment
to studying Scripture.
The hui was a representative event in the
life of our church. But what of life back in the
dioceses and hui amorangi? For example,
how do concepts articulated at the hui play
out for those not present? There was talk at
the hui of going ‘beyond Scripture’ (e.g. as
we have done with usury and the remarriage
of divorcees, so we might in respect of
same-sex partnerships), or of ‘re-envisioning’
homosexuality (e.g. in terms of a theology of
friendship). At the time this seemed pregnant
with possibilities for moving the polarised
debate forward. But would these conceptions
be warmly embraced by the church at large?
Well, having listened to evangelical
responses to the hui, I don’t think we should
get carried away with optimism. Here are
three observations for Taonga readers
to ponder.
One: as this quite long discussion in our
church continues, we are becoming more
conservative. The liberal pressure for change
in our church is losing support among both
clergy and laity. This is partly because new
clergy are being drawn from conservative
parishes, but also because overtly liberal
parishes are not growing across our church.
One sign of this rising conservatism and
lessening liberalism is the sheer lack of
interest in the hui in many parts of the wider
church. (By ‘conservative’ I mean ‘content
to hold things the way they have been’;
whereas ‘evangelical’ refers to a specific set
of theological convictions which often concur
with a conservative disposition. There are
more conservatives than evangelicals in
our church.)

Page 28

Peter Lineham, one of the keynote speakers, addresses the hui.

Two: evangelicals are not for turning.
On the fundamental issue of whether a
homosexual act can be ever recognised as
holy in the context of a committed, faithful
partnership, I detect no imminent shift in
conviction. As I have talked about the hui
with friends and colleagues, I find gracious
interest in ideas of moving ‘beyond Scripture’
and ‘re-envisioning’. But no one says, ‘Ah,
now I see differently.’
Three: evangelicals have a deepening
recognition of the need for pastoral
engagement with gay and lesbian Anglicans
in our midst, and with those not yet part
of Christ’s body. There may or may not
be much interest in debating the issue
in parishes. But at the level of ‘real lives’,
evangelicals are more willing to engage with
gay and lesbian people.
How this will happen in ways that are
mutually agreeable is a question I haven’t
heard answered. But this deepening
recognition should not be dismissed by
those frustrated with evangelical convictions.
It does mean, for example, that evangelicals
are open to engagement with the whole
church on ‘how’ we move forward together
as a church seeking to be ‘faithful to
Scripture’ and ‘open to all.’

At the level of ‘real
lives’, evangelicals are
more willing to
engage with gay and
lesbian people.

These observations come with associated
questions:
• Would further education in our church,
building out from the hui, lead to a shift in
convictions? Answer: no.
• Could things change as re-generation
cycles unfold? In other words, are today’s
evangelical convictions cherished by an
older cadre of leaders, but tomorrow’s
leaders will be different? Answer: possibly.
But there are signs that younger potential
leaders are more, rather than less,
conservative than their elders.
• Is there complacent satisfaction about
the rising conservatism in our church?
Answer: no. Evangelical leaders are
acutely conscious that their parishes, to say
nothing of our whole church, are fighting
what seems like a losing battle on church
participation. It’s not just that attendance is
always threatened by the secular character
of wider society; people who elect to go
to church tend to choose the ‘even more
conservative start-up church’ down the
road from the established parish church.
The third Hermeneutical Hui underlined a
widely shared desire to be a united church.
Our discussion demonstrated that we can
engage our differences in a friendly spirit. But
is our whole church closer to some kind of
consensus about matters such as blessing of
same-sex partnerships? If I were pushing for
change from the status quo as the answer, I
would not be optimistic.
The Rev Dr Peter Carrell is Director of Theology House in
Christchurch.
director@theologyhouse.ac.nz

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

HERMENEUTICAL HUI, July 6-9

A liberal view
Howard Pilgrim

O

n the issue of human sexuality,
I am a liberal evangelical:
someone who believes that the
unchanging Gospel of Christ
is now obliging the church to discover
the potential holiness in faithful same-sex
relationships and to bless such relationships
as a valid form of marriage. At our third
Hermeneutical Hui, those who shared this
conviction put up a strong case in support of
six interdependent principles:
1. Openness to New Interpretations.
We argued that the crucial texts examined
are in fact open to interpretations that do
not condemn all same-sex relationships.
Such fresh interpretations are offered firstly
on the basis of exegesis of what the texts
conveyed in their original contexts; and
secondly on the basis of their significance
in the different conditions of life 2000 years
later. Interpreting the text is not something
we do to get away from its plain message,
as some might think. Rather, both we and
they interpret every biblical text we read,
precisely because we do take the Bible
seriously and want it to speak clearly into our
own situation.
2. The need for a renewed Biblical
Theology. Individual texts are always read
in the light of wider readings of the Bible.
We all attempt to find coherence between
different parts of Scripture, and do so by
identifying key parts which bind others
into an integrated whole. This is what Jesus’
contemporaries were doing when they asked
him which laws were the greatest. However,
such a framework is not explicitly provided in
the scriptures, so there may be good reasons
for recognising alternative biblical theologies
as valid. To subordinate every text bearing
on sexuality to a theology of marriage built
on Genesis 1 and 2 is not the only option.
Other biblical principles such as the love of
God and neighbour might be seen as even
more fundamental keys for understanding
God’s word to us about sexuality.
3. The Importance of Reason and
Experience. We were reminded of how
our understanding of Scripture’s message
for our own cultural context is illuminated

by our life experiences. New knowledge
about sexuality means we must now
question attitudes and beliefs commonly
accepted 2000 years ago. This knowledge,
although still imperfect, is God-given, and
our consciences are bound to take it into
account as we seek to bring godly order
into our life together. A process of reasoned
reflection in which Scripture and experience
shed light on each other is the way in which
classical Anglicanism has always modified
received tradition. A contrary principle, that
Scripture alone has this role, was rejected
as the Anglican norm during the late 17th
century, but lives on as one influential option
within our broad theological spectrum. As
Anglicans, it is not our only path.
4. The Real Presence of Gay and
Lesbian People. In debating issues of
sexuality we are talking about the lives of
actual people loved by God, some of whom
are our brothers and sisters in Christ. They
are often present as we discuss the nature of
their lives but are not free to speak openly
for themselves, because we have not yet
made it safe for them to do so. It was a sign of
progress that our plenary sessions included
personal disclosures by two gay academics
who testified to the reality of their lives in
Christ and the debilitating effects they had
suffered from traditional attitudes and beliefs.
But for other gay and lesbian people in the
room, such frankness was not yet possible.
5. The Status Quo is Unjust. St Paul
wrote that celibacy is a special gift from
God, and that those who do not have that
gift should marry to meet their needs for
intimacy and sexual expression. By denying
any opportunity for same-sex marriages,
how many holy options are we offering gays
and lesbians? Only one: celibacy. So, where
do we go from here? Once we realize that
sexual preference is not something freely

We are the ones who
need liberating, from
our collusion with
dishonesty.

James Harding, from Otago University.

chosen, St Paul’s logic leads us straight
towards the need for same-sex marriages.
To resist this logic is to perpetuate a longstanding injustice. The liberating gospel calls
us to think it out again.
6. Truthfulness is Crucial. Some
conservative evangelicals moved by
the emerging presence of their gay and
lesbian brothers and sisters have begun
speaking about the need for “a pastoral
response”. What this seems to mean is
that same-sex relationships are always
wrong, but the church must find a way to be
more supportive of sinners, following the
precedent of how we deal with divorce and
remarriage. But this model will never fit for
committed same-sex relationships which
aspire to be successful expressions of fidelity
and love rather than brokenness. To treat
gays and lesbians as defective heterosexuals
is a refusal to recognize the truth about their
lives. No wonder some of our bishops are
still telling their gay clergy and ordinands to
live a lie by keeping their sexual orientation
a secret. How can such a church stand
upright as an embodiment of God’s truth?
We are the ones who need liberating, from
our collusion with dishonesty.
It was hard work putting this case at the
hui, and it is apparent that we have a long
way to go together to resolve this issue that
divides us. However, the challenge to change
is not going away, and Christ is calling us
forward into his light.
The Rev Dr Howard Pilgrim is Canon Theologian for the
Diocese of Waiapu.
hnp@snap.net.nz
Page 29

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

T H E B I THE
B L EBIBLE

Tim Meadowcroft applauds the purpose of
hermeneutical hui but says eventually we must face the
question of what God is like.

When hermeneutics
is not enough

O

ne response of the New Zealand
church to the crisis within
the Anglican Communion
has been to hold a series of
hermeneutical hui. This recognizes that much
that divides us is around the interpretation
of Scripture. The logic is that if the process
of biblical interpretation – hermeneutics – is
better understood, and if we can learn better
to understand each other’s interpretive
positions, then we may understand each
other better. This of course begs the
question, what happens when we understand
each other better? Will we then fall into each
other’s arms and interpret together happily
ever after?
Or will we discover that hermeneutics
is not enough – that, as has been rather
cruelly put, hermeneutics is only clearing
the throat? I subscribe only partially to that
view. I disagree with it because a clear
understanding of the nature of texts, of their
interpretation, and of the location of meaning
within them, is critical in a postmodern age
where consensus is in short supply. But I do
agree with it in that hermeneutics cannot be
an end in itself except as a theoretical activity.
Interpretive acuity is not going to provide all
the answers in the interpretation of difficult
texts. To anticipate, sooner or later there must
be a turn from hermeneutics to theology.

Sooner or later
there must be a turn
from hermeneutics
to theology.
The need for hermeneutics arises when
the biblical text is experienced as at odds
with human experience, or challenges
the interests of the reader in some way. If I
struggle to find myself in the texts, perhaps
as a divorced person when Jesus is limiting
the grounds for divorce, or as a gay person
in the face of a blanket condemnation of
homosexual activity, or as a woman when
the narrator acquiesces in the abuse of
the Levite’s concubine, or as a Palestinian
Christian in the face of genocide in Joshua,
then my struggle is more than how to
interpret these things. It also becomes a
question of what God is like. For a believer
who cannot find affirmation in the text of
Scripture, the question arises: can I then find
affirmation in the heart of God? The place
from which such a question is posed truly
is, in the words of Phyllis Trible, “a land of
terror.”1 The question also moves us into the
realm of the theological.
The Bible must be read theologically –
in the light of what God is like. This entails
several moves.
• The first is to recognize a necessary
conceptual distinction between the literary
artifact that is the text and the word of God
which comes by reading the text.
• The second move is to make a further
distinction between the particularity of the
text and the truth towards which the text
points. In other words, the text bears the
limitations of its humanity but the God of
the text does not.
• And a third move is to suppose that,
notwithstanding its particularity, the text
tells enough of God for the reader to be
able to hear when the story told by the

text itself strikes discordant notes within
God’s story. For the Christian reader the
culmination of the story is the word made
flesh in the person of Jesus, and so all
such readings inevitably become in some
sense or other Christological.
These distinctions are enormously risky.
Much can go wrong on the human side of
the encounter with God in God’s story. It
would be much easier if the Scriptures could
simply be asserted as the full and final agent
of revelation, rather than as more austerely
“revelatory” (to appropriate the terminology
used by Sandra Schneiders2), and thus in
need of interpretation. And there is always
the danger of muting the text at points when
it discomfits the reader.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that we have
no choice but to take the risk. The reason
we have no choice is the incarnation of God
in Christ. God becomes known to humanity
by participating in the human experience
in all its messy diversity. This participation is
evocatively foreshadowed in the first book
of the canon: “God [walked] in the garden
at the time of the evening breeze” (Gen 3:8).
For the Christian this dynamic reaches its
culmination in the person of Jesus, in whom
God took on all that it means to be human.
And so we are entitled to be enraged by
the text at points where we know enough of
God to know that God is also enraged, even
though God appears to be silent or absent.
Theories of interpretation are not enough
at such moments; a theology of God and of
humanity is necessary. Bring on the next,
theological hui3.
Tim Meadowcroft is Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies
at Laidlaw College and Laidlaw-Carey Graduate School
in Auckland.
TMeadowcroft@laidlaw.ac.nz

Tackling the
texts that divide
Snapshots fron the
Hermeneutical Hui, Auckland
Dio School for Girls, July 6-9.

apier.
im from N
r
g
il
P
d
r
a
How

from
Peter Linehamrsit
y.
ive
Un
ey
ss
Ma

Frank Sm
St John's itColh lefrom
ge.

Moana Hall Smith from Rotrua.

Keynote addresses at the Hermeneutical
Hui are on the Taonga website:
http://anglicantaonga.org.nz/News/
Common-Life/Terror

Page 31

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

THE ECONOMY

Brian Easton says that even though the financial crisis is
apparently over, we should still prepare ourselves for four
or more years of stagnation

You

and a prolonged recession

$

T

he world has just gone through
its greatest financial crisis since
the 1930s. We may be grateful
that things were not as bad as
feared, but while the financial stage of the
crisis appears to be over, there are still
economic consequences working through
the international economy. We don’t fully
understand them; the only people who are
sure about what is happening are those
who have not been following events.
However, one thing that seems
reasonably certain is that the Western
economies are going to come out of it on
a lower growth track than before 2008.
That means that when the economies start
growing again, they will settle down at a
similar growth rate to the past, but they will
not fully recover the lost level of production,
a situation I have tried to capture in the
accompanying stylised graph.
The transition between the two growth
paths will look like a prolonged recession
-- a period of stagnant growth with up and
down wiggles and bouts of false optimism
followed by dire pessimism. We seem to

be in one of the downers at the moment, so
gloom is the fashion.
How long will the recession – the
period of stagnation – be? We don't know,
but it is probably related to how much
lower the new growth track is. The slowly
forming consensus among informed

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Page 32

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economists is that the step down for New
Zealand may be about 5 percent of output
(and a bit more of expenditure, as I shall
explain shortly). That would represent a
recession of at least four years – so that
we cannot expect it to end before 2013.
Admittedly, the government may generate
This is an open contract subject to annual
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Anglican Taonga

a boom for election purposes, but it will be
unsustainable and in the long run delay the
sustainable upturn.
The accompanying graph gives a
stylised representation of the underlying
trend described in the previous
paragraphs. There will be short fluctuations
around the trend (including the downer in
2008) but the basic picture is that we are
likely to have a period of stagnation for at
least four years, and when we get back on
the growth track it will be a lower one.
This (probably four-year recession)
means higher unemployment and greater
hardship for some people. Implicit in much
public policy is how that hardship is going
to be shared among the population. Think
of it this way: If output is going to step down
5 percent, then incomes will be 5 percent
lower too. Expenditure will be even lower,
because we were borrowing heavily before
the Global Financial Crisis at a level we now
know was unsustainable. (A moderating
complication is that the expenditure won’t
be cut overnight. Rather, we shall have to
show expenditure restraint until 2013 and
probably beyond.)
So the question is who will be cutting
their expenditure by 5 and more percent?
Too often we hope that it will be someone
else. Thus the rich are demanding – and
getting – tax cuts so someone else has to
take a bigger reduction in their standard
of living. That’s what happened during the
Rogernomics recession when average
incomes stagnated for seven years. The
tax cuts ensured that incomes of the top 10
percent continued to grow as if nothing had
happened, so the rest of the community’s
after-tax incomes declined.
One solution is to argue for cuts in
government spending. (The British
government is talking of cutting most
of its agency spending by 40 percent.)
Let’s dismiss those who claim that there
will be quality improvements to offset the
spending reductions. (They said the same
thing during the Rogernomics recession.)
Let’s also acknowledge there are some
inefficiencies which we should address as
best as we can. We are always doing that,
and the one thing we have learned is that
dealing with wasteful expenditure without
affecting valued spending is really difficult.
It is nicely summarised by the notion that
the fat in government spending is like that
in prime beef – stippled through – and you
destroy the meat if you try to eliminate it.
Cutting government spending is going

to impact harshly on the poor and those on
middle incomes who will get insufficient
offsetting tax cuts. The reality then is that
we will have to take a cut in our private
spending and public spending, and some
will take more than others.
The balance between public and private
spending involves political judgements
(which we often try to obscure by
pseudoscientific arguments). Each reader
will have their own view on the degree of
tax cuts and public spending cuts.
Here’s a suggestion though. If you can
cut back on your spending, give some of
the savings to charity – perhaps a parish or

SPRING 2010

community project, or even an international
one – to share the hardship more evenly.
Try to make it a permanent cutback and a
permanent pledge. When there were brutal
hardships generated in the early 1990s,
people initially gave generously, but charity
fatigue set in. This time, think about giving
generously for at least four years.
I reckon that’s what the Good Samaritan
would be doing, and what the man who told
his story would be advising.
Brian Easton is a Wellington economist and
commentator.

Page 33

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

Tony Fitchett says the Standing Committee is
sweating through the same old tensions

Turning up

L

the heat

ondon turned on the
heat for the July 2010
meeting of the Standing Committee of the
Communion – up to 26 degrees
rather than the cold, rain and
snow of the December 2009
meeting. But the contentious
issues were the same: disputes
over same-sex relationships and
cross-border interventions.
In December the nomination
of Mary Glasspool, a priest in a
long-term same-sex relationship,
to be an assistant bishop in
the Diocese of Los Angeles
had triggered unsuccessful
attempts by some members of
Standing Committee to exclude
The Episcopal Church of the
USA [TEC] from Communion
activities.
Between meetings three
members [one of whom had
never attended] resigned in
protest: it is, perhaps, significant
that two were primates and
the other a bishop, and that
both primates, in letters to the
Archbishop of Canterbury,
complained that the primates
should be making decisions
for the Communion, rather than
bodies including clergy and
laity. A different view of Order
from mine – and, I suspect, from
that of most of this church – but
Standing Committee noted

its regret at the reduction in
engagement of different views.
By July Mary Glasspool had
been consecrated, and the
Archbishop of Canterbury had
already removed members
of TEC from ecumenical
dialogues and the Faith and
Order Commission, and stated
his intention to act similarly
with those from other provinces
breaking any of the three
moratoria1.
This did not go down well with
several members of Standing
Committee, and questions were
raised about his right to do so.
John Rees, legal adviser to the
Anglican Consultative Council,
ruled that, in the absence of
other provisions, it could be
assumed that the appointer could
also remove members. But one
member of Standing Committee
wanted more action, calling
passionately for exclusion of TEC
members from any consideration
of Faith and Order issues by any
Communion body. This move
failed, but appreciation was
expressed for his presence at the
meeting, and engagement with it.
Considerable time was spent
dealing with ‘legal’ matters,
including final registration of
the new constitution of ACC a
few days earlier, membership
of Standing Committee, and

filling vacancies. John
Rees also presented an
opinion, at the request of this
church, about provisions of the
proposed Covenant over-riding
the constitution of the ACC.
His careful analysis suggests
that members of churches that
have rejected or given up on
the Covenant are excluded
from the processes set out in
the Covenant, but not from
substantive decision-making [eg,
regarding membership] by ACC.
But those still considering it,
however long that may take, are
still included in the process.
There was plenty of other
business, including ecumenical
matters, Mission, Faith and Order,
Anglican Networks, the Bible in
the Life of the Church project and
Continuing Indaba, finance2, and
formal reporting to the Charity
Commissioners3.
Previously, the only reporting
to the church on Standing
Committee meetings were
the minutes, not confirmed till
the next meeting, and some
lobbyists have exploited
this delay to attack Standing
Committee. This time the new
Communications Officer for the
Communion issued four bulletins
during the meeting, posted on
the ACNS website.
It was not all work: on the first

evening
we went to
Lambeth for the
superb ‘Treasures of the Lambeth
Palace Library’ exhibition and
dinner in the Guard Room, and
on Sunday we attended morning
Eucharist at Westminster Abbey,
toured the Abbey and lunched
in its garden, followed by a ride
in the London Eye and a return
river trip to the Tower.
All was underpinned by
worship. Morning Prayer,
Eucharist and Evening Prayer
each day involved us all, and
brief reports on our home
provinces during the offices kept
us grounded. Importantly, strong
disagreement on some matters
did not separate us from each
other, in life or in sacrament.
Tony Fitchett is lay representative for
this church to the ACC and a member
of Standing Committee of the Anglican
Communion.
t_fitchett@yahoo.com

NOTES
1. Requested by the Windsor Report, relating to
consecration of those in same-sex relationships
as bishops, authorization of blessings of samesex unions, and cross-border interventions.
2. Those affected by the reduction in interest
rates in NZ may like to reflect on the fact that
interest on deposits in the UK at present is 0.5%!
3. Which needs to demonstrate “public good” –
no longer assumed, as in the past, for religious
charities.

A good childhood
The Science and the Spirit of Good Parenting in the 21st Century
DVDs available of the series – $30.
Contact: Chris Church, Theology House, 30 Church Lane, Merivale, Christchurch 8014
Email: admin@theologyhouse.ac.nz

Page 34

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

Bosco Peters gets a spiritual lift from some atheist billboards

Wherever there is goodness –

O

God is present

ne afternoon I went for a walk in
the winter sunshine, to one of the
less-affluent parts of town. Along
the way I spotted the billboard,
“In the beginning, man created God.” Atheists
raised over $22,000 for signs like this.
Reminding people that it has all had a
beginning doesn’t actually play in atheists’
favour. It was a Christian, Fr Georges
Lemaître, who in 1931 suggested that the
entire universe started at a single point. Fred
Hoyle famously mocked this theory, calling
it Fr Lemaître’s “Big Bang”! The theory has
been refined. The name stuck.
It is part of the popular Kalam
cosmological argument for God’s existence:
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Another billboard reads, “We are all
atheists about most gods, some of us just go
one god futher.”
Atheists can be prophets. They can
challenge the idol we call “God”. Some
people tell me, “I do not believe in God.”
My response often is, “Tell me about this
‘God’ you do not believe in.” When they do,
very often I find the “God” they describe is
one I do not and could not believe in either.
I acknowledge the great damage that
bad religion and bad theology and bad
spirituality have done. But I don’t see
Dawkins and other antitheists giving up sex
or money just because of the great damage
that sex and money have done in human
history!
The tagline, “There’s probably no God,
now stop worrying and enjoy your life”, is
based on an impression of an almighty
punishing ogre in the sky. Nothing should be
further from a Christian perspective of God
who is love.
C. S. Lewis captured well how our
concepts and words are human constructs,
signposts to the ineffable Mystery, the
Ultimate Reality we call “God”. He wrote A
Footnote to All Prayers:
He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring
Thou,

And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in
heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing
Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers
blaspheme
Worshiping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived,
address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts,
unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolaters, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy
great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor
translate.
The third billboard text is, “Good without
God? Over one million Kiwis are.”
In the liturgy we say of God, “You are
the source of all life and goodness”. As
Erasmus would have it, and Jung so famously
reinforced: “Vocatus atque non vocatus Deus
aderit - Bidden or not bidden, God is present.”
It is not the registering of oneself on the
census as having a religion that makes God
present in one’s life. Nor does the registering
of oneself as “no religion” remove God’s
presence from one’s life. Wherever there is
love – God is present (“Ubi caritas et amor,
Deus ibi est”). Wherever there is goodness –
God is its source.
I want to work in partnership with all of
goodwill – Christians, those of other faiths,
agnostics, atheists – to make this a better
place. Many atheists challenge me by their
altruism and generosity.
Some people see Christianity as being
about great rewards for limited loving
investment. But orthodox
Christianity is not about
rewards – it is about
love for its own sake.
And life (in its
fullness) is always a
gift – not a reward.

The cafe I had my coffee in is run by
Christians. They probably don’t want that
made a big deal of, because “Christian”
has so many unhelpful connotations. They
are not “preachy” – the goal of the cafe isn’t
to get more people into church or anything
like that.
Many of those who work there have
intentionally chosen to live in the area and
are working to improve it. All profits from
the cafe are given away, ploughed back into
justice for workers on coffee plantations, the
local community, and so forth. Some people
are working in the cafe voluntarily. The cafe
clearly has a passion for justice and for fair
trade.
As I sip my coffee I wonder what these
people would have done with the more
than $22,000 that was raised to put up the
billboard, and ones like it, overlooking this
part of town…
Bosco Peters is Chaplain at Christ’s College,
Christchurch, and in his spare time runs
www.liturgy.co.nz
Liturgy.co.nz@gmail.com

ow much do you know
about New Zealand’s prison
statistics? To the right is a
simple quiz I used at two
seminars in Christchurch
recently. Check your answers at the end.
How did you score? If you got most of
the answers right you are probably one of a
small minority of New Zealanders. You are
probably also very concerned about the
direction our country is taking – tougher
sentences, more prisons, more social
breakdown, less safety for the community
at large.
It’s distressing that a thirst for punishment
seems to drive the unbelievably high
level of support for the Three Strikes Law
(Q7). New Zealanders would not regard
themselves as a harsh, uncaring and
punitive people, yet Q7 suggests we are
just that. Especially when only two thirds of
those who support the new law believe it
will do any good (Q8).
The latter sentiment is borne out by the
answers in Q9: the recidivist rate is 70%
on average and 90% for 18-21 year olds.
Dramatic outcomes of this extent are a clear
indication that present retributive policies

are counter-productive. They are bad news
for the offenders who re-enter society
worse off than when they were jailed, bad
news for the families of offenders, bad news
for the whole of society which is at risk from
the consequences of a deteriorating social
order, and bad news for race relations
insofar as more than half of the prison
population is Maori.
What does the latter say about our Treaty
obligations? There’s also a high rate of
mental dysfunction in the prison population,
and much of this goes untreated.
Consider also the financial cost. A simple
calculation of 8500 prisoners @ $95,000 pa
comes to $807 million annually. Suppose
this amount was spent on programmes
to remedy the many social factors which
give rise to crime, programmes such as
education, housing, family support, job
training or drug and alcohol rehabilitation.
Lord Bingham, former Chief Justice in
England, has written:
The typical offender is usually male, of low
intelligence, addicted to drugs or alcohol,
from a family where there has been parental
conflict or separation, harsh or erratic
discipline, and emotional, physical or sexual

From a theological perspective current
policies could be described as heretical.
Page 36

The Quiz
How many inmates are there in
NZ prisons?
■ 4000 ■ 6500 ■ 8500
2. What proportion is Maori?
■ 25% ■ 40% ■ 55%
3. How many NZers per 100,000
are in prison?
■ 100 ■ 200 ■ 300
4. In western nations, what is
NZ’s incarceration rate?
■ 2nd highest ■ 8th ■ 15th
5. What is the annual cost per
person in jail?
■ $50,000 ■ $75,000 ■ $95,000
6. How much p.a. for an offender
on a community-based sentence?
■ $3500 ■ $5000
7. How many NZers supported the
Three Strikes Law?
■ 52% ■ 67% ■ 81%
8. How many believed it would
have a deterrent effect?
■ 55% ■ 70% ■ 80%
9. What is the recidivist (reoffending) rate within five years
in NZ?
(a) on average:
■ 40% ■ 55% ■ 70%
(b) 18-21 yr olds:
■ 50% ■ 70% ■ 90%
10. In Rimutaka Prison there
is an FBU wing. What does FBU
stand for?

Anglican Taonga

abuse. He will have no school qualification,
have been troublesome leading to expulsion
or truancy…..with a background of poverty,
poor housing, instability, association with
delinquent peers and unemployment.
I find it hard to believe that in the light
of such considerations the population at
large would not support better alternatives.
I also find it hard to believe that our
parliamentarians, including those who
sit around the Cabinet table, would not
privately recognize the counter-productive
nature of current policy.

The tragedy is that widespread public
ignorance of the facts, whipped along by
a handful of MPs and community lobby
groups with ample support from the media,
paralyses our politicians into submission to
popular sentiment. It has been claimed that
in the USA the private prison corporations
are funding the ‘lock them up’ lobby groups
as a boost to business.
Making the changes will not be easy.
A huge shift in public sentiment will be
required. Victoria University criminologist
John Pratt studied prisons in Scandinavia

SPRING 2010

in 2008-09 and found positive and open
policies aimed at re-establishing people
in normal social life. But he questions
whether there is a sufficient level of trust
and egalitarianism in New Zealand society,
and hence the political will, to make
changes in our own penal system, despite
its manifest failings.
In Scandinavian countries the
incarceration rate is only a quarter of ours.
Further, the rate in Finland has decreased
significantly in the past 25 years, while
the New Zealand rate has increased by a
comparable amount. Change is possible.
The Faith-Based Unit (Q10), part of
Rimutaka Prison, houses 60 prisoners
who volunteer to be there. Kim Workman,
director of Rethinking Crime and
Punishment, reports that the recidivism
rate is around 25% (cf. Q9), there have
been no positive drug tests in five years,
and a low level of incidents – about three
assaults a year.
From a theological perspective current
policies could be described as heretical.
The core value of retribution on which they
are based is diametrically opposed to the
Christian ethic of reconciliation, forgiveness,
and restoration. Alternative policies are not
soft, wet bus-ticket options. They require a
clear focus on remedial programmes. They
require appropriate attitudes and actions
towards victims. They require achieving
progress towards defined outcomes.
But essentially they offer hope,
rehabilitation and a new life to the offender
and to all society. I have no doubt that
most of us, presented with the facts and
sensible penal alternatives, would vote
for something much different from what
we’ve got. And with a groundswell of public
support, politicians would be encouraged
to take a lead for change.
A nationwide coalition of churches and
community groups to achieve just such
a change is being considered. Email me
if you or your parish would like to know
more.
Answers to Quiz: 1. 8500; 2. 55%; 3. 200;
4. 2nd highest; 5. $95,000; 6. $3500; 7.
81%; 8. 55%; 9a. 70%; 9b. 90%: 10.
Faith-Based Unit (see article).
Bishop Richard Randerson is a writer and speaker on
faith, ethics and society
randersonjr@paradise.net.nz

Page 37

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

The elusive

Young Adult
W

Spanky Moore explains why
young people fall out of
church after leaving high
school, and suggests a way for
them to keep the faith.

Page 38

alking into an Anglican
church I sometimes hear
David Bellamy’s affectionate
lisp ringing in my ears:
“Behold the ellusive but much-soughtafter Young Adult. For decades scientists
didn’t consider them a subspecies at all,
but in recent years they have become
increasingly rare on Sundays, preferring to
habituate local malls or just sleep in.
“There was a time when these specimens
would migrate easily from the youth group
flock to the full-fledged adult community
but now, for some reason, perhaps global
warming or postmodernitis, they tend to fly
to university and never return. Can we save
them before it’s too late?”
In case you haven’t noticed, the
world has been going through a lot of
change lately, and one such change is
the emergence of a new life-stage called
“young adulthood”. It used to be a short,
awkward time between high school and

settling down, a thin band of about three
years before someone would get married
and begin planting kids.
These were the years of study, intense
shortlived relationships, road trips and
badly paid jobs, but in recent times this gap
has turned into a gulf. These day’s it’s pretty
standard for this period to last well into the
late 20s, and often beyond. Young adulthood
is not really an in-between period any more;
it’s a fully fledged life-stage.
This time of flux also sees the church
lose young adults altogether – from
Anglican parishes and often from the
Christian faith. I asked a regional youth
adviser to name the drop-off rate after
youth group. He said about 90% enrol in
uni and fall off the planet, never to be heard
from again. The young adults we do keep
tend to be those we’re paying to work
for us or who have become entangled in
church leadership.
So why do most of them go and not

Anglican Taonga

come back? There’s a complex cocktail of
reasons, many of which you’ve probably
heard before, but this post-high school
age is a significant, life-defining time of
change. They move out of home into flatting
situations, meet hordes of new friends, get
their first jobs, control their own money and
pay their own bills.
Add to that university study, which
introduces exciting new ways of thinking
about the world, and you can see that this is
the time when young adults begin to shape
their own identity and beliefs beyond the
family values they’ve inherited.
It’s also a time when Christianity is
ridiculed as an intellectual joke by most
university lecturers and as a pointless
social roadblock by friends. Think about
it – one year you’re playing musical chairs
at youth group, the next you’re studying
comparative religions in sociology. It’s easy
to get the impression Christianity just isn’t a
credible option.
So, how do we provide space for young
adults to explore new ways of thinking
about faith, even that radical edge of faith,
without Christianity being discarded as a
restricting family value or youth group fad?
The answer shouldn’t come as a
surprise: discipleship. It’s probably the thing
that’s most lacking in young adults’ lives as
they head into the big wide world, but it’s
also the thing that might stem the tide.
Discipleship is both relational and
flexible – two things essential for
responding to young adults’ questions
authentically, while keeping them

SPRING 2010

At university Christianity is
ridiculed as an intellectual joke by most
lecturers and as a pointless social
roadblock by friends.
accountable to their newfound freedom.
But as Bishop Graham Cray said on his
recent visit to our shores, “consumerism
makes disciples better than Christianity
does.” If we’re to heed Jesus’ central call to
make full-life, life-long disciples of Him, we
desperately need to work out better ways of
doing that for young adults.
One approach we’re experimenting with
in Christchurch is the Society of Salt and
Light – a collaborative effort involving seven
parishes (www.saltandlight.co.nz).
Once a month all the young adult groups
meet in a local cafe for a “summit” – an
evening of discipleship-focused, interactive,
fast-paced teaching and storytelling, with
plenty of space for discussion and the holy
sacrament of inter-parish flirting.
On the other three weeks of the month
each group meets at parish level to eat
and study together, helped by resources
we’ve developed to work alongside the
summits. This approach connects smaller
groups of young adults into a critical mass,
while encouraging them to serve and be
discipled within their local parishes. It’s
early days yet, but the approach is just one

of many possible options.
There’s a reason not many people are
doing ministry to young adults right now
– and I don’t mean simply tagging ‘young
adults’ on to the job description of your
already over-burdened, part-time youth
minister. It’s so damn hard.
Young adults are old enough to think for
themselves, be contrary, and often demand
the right to self-direct. But they’re also busy
and at times ignorant, uncommitted and
unreliable.
The church desperately needs patient
people committed to a life-long interest
in this vital life-stage and doing effective
mission and ministry with them. If we
want to see the generation gap in our
congregations begin to close, young
adults are one of the best places to start.
Otherwise, all of us may end up on the
extinct species list.
Spanky Moore specialises in young adults ministry in
the Diocese of Christchurch.
spankymoore@gmail.com

t just gets better and better. The
Anglican Supergroup at Parachute
Festival 2010 brought over 500 young
Anglicans together from almost every
diocese. Together we enjoyed the great
sounds and atmosphere of one of the
biggest Christian music festivals outside
of the USA. We sang, worshipped and ate
together, and generally got to know each
other better as part of the Anglican family.
At Parachute 2010 we also learnt to
serve together. After two days of heat
and sunshine, the weather turned to
custard with a deluge that would have
worried Noah. After the weight of the
water collapsed one of our marquees we
evacuated many tents, the kitchen and
dining area to a large covered space.

With help from Archbishop David
Moxon and Waiapu’s Bishop David Rice we
soon set the chaos in order and carried on
serving breakfasts and dinners so our last
two days were a great experience despite
the washout.
We also fed bedraggled refugees
from other groups who didn’t have
our resources and organisation. New
friendships were made, and some asked
to be part of the Anglicans@Parachute
Supergroup in 2011.
This is a rare opportunity to savour
breakfast pancakes cooked and served by
our very own Archbishop David, to get to
know the wider Anglican family better and
to enjoy all delights that Parachute Festival
has to offer.

Above: All hands to the washing up at Mystery Creek,
Hamilton. The Anglican Supergroup returns on January
28-30; discounted tickets available.

Anglicans@Parachute offer tickets at
reduced Supergroup prices. We set up a
base camp where you can have tea and
coffee, and chill out. Breakfasts are served
every morning and you can sign up for the
Waiapu Meal Deal. For the early risers we
start each day with Anglican worship and
on Sunday evening gather for Anglican
Eucharist.
Wade Aukett and Jocelyn Czerwonka
Join Anglicans@Parachute today – for more information
and news updates contact Wade at wade@aym.org.nz
or Jocelyn at jocelyn.dymf@xtra.co.nz

Equipping ministry in today’s world
Evangelical in conviction
Anglican in ecclesiology
At BTC, we aim to equip students to think for
themselves, both theologically and biblically.
Our focus combines two key interests:
‘Dynamic Anglicanism’ Anglicanism at its best:
innovative, engaging, imaginative, with depth and
a clear missional focus.
‘Double-listening’ The capacity to listen and
understand our world and diverse cultures, and
to ground ourselves in the biblical traditions that
shape our faith.
BTC operates on a ‘blended learning’ model of
education, offering NZQA degree courses in
association with Laidlaw College.

Box seat
John Bluck comes back from the DVD store with tales of apartheid,
star-crossed lovers, and a big kid living in fantasy land
Boy

T

aika Waititi has broken all
the Kiwi box office records
with this film before its
DVD release. It’s as important to
see as the All Blacks in the World
Cup final, and will tell you a lot
more about who we are as New
Zealanders, even though there
are far fewer Pakeha in the movie
than our national rugby team.
The Boy is 11-year-old
Alamein (James Rolleston)
supported by younger brother
Rocky (Te Ahu Eketone-Whitu)
who looks after the little kids
while Nana goes away for a
while. Alamein manages the
house with adult seriousness.
Then Dad (Taika Waititi)
comes home from prison with
his mates driving a V8 Valiant
Ranger and the film descends
into childish chaos. Because Dad
is the real kid in the movie, in the
sense of living in fantasy land.
Veteran of Rambo wars, rugby
star, Maori samurai, pothead
dreamer, he can do no wrong in
Alamein’s eyes. The film explores
the hilarity and the tragedy of this
loser hero with as surefooted and
deft a demonstration of cinematic
storytelling as we’ve ever seen
nationally on the big screen.
And while it’s a Maori story
told through Maori eyes, it’s
also indebted to Michael
Jackson, Hollywood, Western
consumerism and all the other
ingredients of our cross-cultural
boil-up, served up as it was and
still could be, in Waihau Bay
in 1984.
So mark this movie as made
with pride in Aotearoa New
Zealand. It tells us more than
any textbook or sermon about
our nostalgia over where we’ve
been; our dreams of where we’d
rather be, and the myths we use
to reinvent and inflate ourselves
to each other.

Skin

Samson and Delilah

We’ve done some weird
things to ourselves as New
Zealanders in the name of
racial purity – xenophobic laws
against Chinese, Aryan myths
about Maori, fantasies about
being the Better Britons of the
South Seas. But nothing beat
the madness of South Africa’s
apartheid policy.
Look at it afresh in this new
movie by Anthony Fabian and
realize that using legal definitions of race to measure human
values and make social boundaries ranks up there with the
worst of the 20th century’s sins.
The film’s story is true, as
you’re reminded at the end
when the credits tell you what
has happened to the characters
you’d hoped were only fictional.
Sandra Laing was born in
1955 to staunchly white Afrikaner parents but “Coloured”
in appearance – which meant
“Coloured” by social category, at
least until the apartheid law was
changed in an effort to overcome
such genetic surprises.
Sandra’s legal journey, from
Coloured to White and back to
Coloured again when she married a Black man, would make
a Monty Pythonesque absurdity,
were it not for the fact it took
her and her family to hell and
back. The film ends with South
Africa’s independence from this
nightmare, but it comes too late
for most of them.
Skin is smart enough to let
the story speak for itself. And
the Kiwi connection through
Sam Neill as the bigoted Afrikaner father, whom he plays
with great sympathy, brings this
movie very close to home.

Not a Hebrew Bible story but
a central Australian moral fable
of equally epic scale.
An instant Australian classic,
Warwick Thornton’s tough tale
of star-crossed and ill-fated
young lovers won the Camera
d’Or at Cannes.
It moves slowly to respect the
pace that its characters live at
in a tiny Aboriginal settlement.
Which is no pace at all. No work,
no hope, nothing to do all day
but wait.
The only source of
excitement for 15-year-old
Samson is the petrol he and
his mates sniff incessantly. That
is, until he meets 16-year-old
Delilah who spends her time
caring for her elderly Nana –
a traditional dot painter whose
art and laughter are the main
sources of light and life in
the movie.
The art is beautifully
expressed and so is the love
that these angry, inarticulate
teenagers stumble and fumble
their way towards. You can
be sure this movie wasn’t
celebrated or even mentioned
during the recent Australian
elections, any more than Boy
will be talked about too much
in our own political campaigns
next year.

Boy

Skin

Bishop John Bluck is retired and living
north of Auckland.
JohnBluck@xtra.co.nz

Between
worlds
T
he earthly life of a pioneering
Maori woman writer, Jacqueline
Cecilia Sturm, ended on
December 30 last year in
Wellington, as she left on a
journey to ‘that bright place/(I believe - / I
swear I believe)/ Where we may be together/
Again, for ever’.1
The pronoun of address in this short and
tender poem is directed at no generalised
‘we’ – as in humanity itself – but to one
particular human being, her late exhusband, the legendary poet James K.
Baxter. Channelling his own borrowed Maori
imagery of death’s door, ‘the dreaded fog/
Of Hine-nui-te-po’, she asks that the man
who abandoned their troubled marriage in
1969 – and went on to found the controversial
Jerusalem community beside a Maori pa on
the Whanganui River – light her way through
unknown terrors at the moment of death.2
What a contrast this is to another poem,
‘Grieving, 1972 – for Jim’, appearing two
pages earlier in Dedications, her longforestalled first book of poetry, published
in 1996 after decades of literary silence.
In one of the great female tirades against
feckless males to appear in New Zealand –
or any other – literature, she lets him have it:
‘You – bugger/ You – arsehole/ You – stinking
shithouse/ Dying/ without me/ Leaving/ me
stranded/ Having/ to keep on/ Living/ without
you/ Knowing/ I’ll never/ See you/ again/ You
bastard – / You bloody bastard you –.’3
Between these twin poles of rage and
reconciliation travel powerful currents of
Page 42

emotion, shaping the life of this diminutive
and determined woman: orphaned almost
at the point of birth in 1927 by the death
of her mother from septicaemia, and the
disappearance of her father, the death shortly
thereafter of her grandmother and carer, her
adoption by Salvationists, a life thereafter
lived between two worlds, Pakeha and Maori,
her marriage to Baxter and its breakdown,
and the subsequent years of struggle as a
solo mother, a librarian who was really a
writer-in-waiting, a pioneering university
graduate, a Maori woman at odds with the
dominant masculine and racist ethos of the
post-war period that would certainly have
suffocated and silenced a lesser spirit.
As a poet, Jacqui Sturm employs a
deceptively simple palate to convey
complex human realities, but always beneath
the surface is the process of emotional
transference, of getting the feelings behind
the experience on to the page. She believed
that ‘a writer should be allowed to do what
their emotional memory tells them, with all
the passion in the world. Never mind about
their ethnicity, never mind about their gender,
just let them do it’.4
Poetry was her first love in writing, but
marriage to the literary prodigy Baxter
convinced her that she could never be a
real poet, and so she turned – in the midst
of domestic pressures as a 1950s wife and
mother – to the short story form. It was her
stories, coming to notice of Erik Schwimmer,
editor of Te Ao Hou (the pioneering journal
of Maori writing) in 1955, that showcased

Above left: Jacqui and Baxter in the good years.
Above right: Jacqui and her granddaughter Stephanie at
the unveiling of Baxter’s headstone at Jerusalem in 1973.

her potential as a chronicler in fiction of New
Zealand life, especially that of women and
those on the margins.
But not even publication of her story For
All the Saints, in an Oxford University Press
anthology of New Zealand short stories in
1966 – making her the first Maori writer to
be selected for inclusion – could ensure
the opening of a literary career and the
recognition to which she was entitled. The
marriage breakdown and the pressures of
working, and raising two children (and later
a granddaughter) kept the lid on her output
and her aspirations.
As a Maori woman, cut off from her
maternal links to Taranaki and her paternal
connections to Whakatahea, whangai to
Ngati Porou by virtue of her adoptive father,
Bert Sturm’s whakapapa, her only recourse
to a sense of Maori belonging was her
involvement with Ngati Poneke, one of the
early urban Maori cultural groups which
grew up in New Zealand cities during and
after World War 2 as a response to the great
internal migration from the country to the
town. She also worked to support others in
the Maori Women’s Welfare League.
It was not until the early 1980s that her
fortunes began to change: Baxter, the object
of her rage in the poem above, was 10 years
dead, when the much-heralded Maori writer
Witi Ihimaera realised that the librarian
issuing his books in the Wellington Library
was none other than J. C. Sturm. Here was
a fellow Maori writer whose stories he had
read years earlier in Te Ao Hou, alerting

Anglican Taonga

him to the possibility of Maori writing
for and about each other (as opposed to
paternalistic Pakeha doing it for them).
He promptly persuaded her to give him
some stories for a new anthology of writing
by Maori that he was editing – Into The
World of Light – and by 1982, her career
was suddenly relaunched. In the following
year, her first full collection, The House of the
Talking Cat, was published by a women’s
group, The Spiral Collective. In her mid-50s,
the breakthrough had finally come.
Not that her story continues on a glowing
upward path: like many women writers of her
generation, Jacqui Sturm’s late appearance
was still hedged about by relationships
and meeting the needs of others. She
continued to work as a librarian, while raising
her granddaughter Stephanie until her
retirement, when she was able to return to
writing poetry at will.
The daily commuter train journey from
Paekakariki into Wellington had given
her time to write, and in its brief span she
was able to compose short poems, many
addressed to family members. These were
to form the basis of her first book of poetry,
entitled Dedications in recognition of a series
of mihimihi she had written to important
people in her life. The first was to Stephanie,
who became her carer, who was also to
die of a rare infection, in her early 40s. This
last tragic straw no doubt hastened Jacqui
Sturm’s death a few weeks later.
Dedications was an instant success,
winning an honour award in the 1997
Montana Book Awards, and was followed by
a second book of poetry, Postscripts, in 2000.
The House of the Talking Cat has also been
republished (2003), along with fresh stories,
and poetry in The Glass House (2006) – all
by the pioneering publisher of poetry and
Maori affairs, Steele Roberts of Wellington.
In 2003, this remarkable woman’s
lifetime achievement against the odds
was honoured by Victoria University of
Wellington, in the conferral of the honorary
degree of Doctor of Literature. Her
recognition – unjustly deferred – was late,
but richly deserved and enjoyed.
Jacqui Sturm was a remarkable woman,
in ways that have only been touched upon
here. In person, she was deeply humble and
self-effacing, to a degree little seen in the
writing stars of today’s festival circuit. As a
Maori woman, she lived through the reflexive
racism of her post-Depression generation,
while yet unable to fully experience her
Maori identity, through being brought up
Pakeha. As a woman, over the same lifetime,

SPRING 2010

well into the 1970s, she endured the female
lot in a New Zealand where a stultifying
patriarchy often ruled the roost.
All such repression and limitation,
this borderline status, was to feed into her
writing: a literature of the outsider looking
in, and reading with intense accuracy the
currents of feeling that made for her
times. She has also bequeathed
a literature of the spirit, where
both human failure and human
forgiveness live on, to enrich
those who read the records
of such a heartbreaking
journey.
Dr Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
teaches at Canterbury
University.
NOTES
1 ‘Urgently - for Jim’, from
Dedications, Steele Roberts
(Wellington: 1996, 2003), p80.
2 For a full obituary, see, Holman,
Jeffrey Paparoa: http://www.
stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/
national/obituaries/3217296/
Jacqueline-Sturm-A-pioneeringliterary-figure
3 Dedications, p77.
4 From Broken Journey: The Life and
Art of J C Sturm, Māori TV (2007).

Jacqui Sturm was deeply humble and self-effacing,
to a degree little seen in the writing stars of today’s
festival circuit.

Page 43

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

BOOKS

No country for old men
Hidden Country. Having Faith in Aotearoa
New Zealand by John Bluck
Pakiri, Bathgate Press, 2010. ($34.95)
Availble from epworth books box 17255,
wellinton 6147
Peter Matheson

A

s one would expect with John
Bluck, this book is a page-turner,
brutally hard to put down. Its first
part, the longer one, is about
the stations of his own life’s pilgrimage, the
second looks thematically at the challenge
of finding a voice, a place, an identity, a
future, a faith for Christian life and belief in
New Zealand. In short it asks: what would a
spirituality grounded in Aotearoa look like?
Important!
He sketches his childhood in little Nuhaka
in the 1950s, the place and the people, the
exciting but safe adventures in bush and
river, the gatherings in his dad’s garage,
vintage small-town New Zealand stuff. We
walk it with him. Equally vivid is the abrupt
shift to the boarding school in Napier, his
‘stalag by the sea’, its emotional coldness
and cultural narrowness. This time we
shudder with him!
Some fine role models, though, nourished
his vocation to priesthood, so off he went to
College House in Canterbury, revelling in
his motorbike and the dignity and freedom
of a student, while doffing his hat, though not
much more, to the demands of a traditionalist
formation programme.
But then Harvey Cox’s Secular City had
him hooked. Nothing for it, he must get to the

‘… seeing the world, lit up,
alive and radiant with the
presence of the holy’

Page 44

States! Despite much opposition he eventually
got permission and raised the wind to study
at Episcopal Theological School, Boston. Here
we begin to see the John Bluck we later came
to know emerging.
He was pitched into the ferocious Vietnam
controversies, learned first hand about racism
and acute poverty, found a mate for life in
Elizabeth, became a reporter for Cardinal
Cushing’s Boston Pilot, swam in an everexpanding world. Lapped it up. After a brief
curacy in Gisborne, though, it was on to
Wellington, as chaplain to the Polytech and
tutor in the School of Journalism, getting the
wave-length of NZ again.
Crucial was the ensuing Auckland
experience – he edited the cutting-edge
Methodist paper, New Citizen, and through
St Matthew’s in the City became involved in
ecumenism, issues around homosexuality
and Maori sovereignty. Meanwhile, his
young family grew up, loving the occasional
excursions (as I was delighted to read) to
Matheson’s Bay. Who wouldn’t?
Already we can begin to see the shape
his later ministry would take as Dean at
Christchurch, with the treasure trove of
liturgical innovations, and as Bishop of Waiapu
– those remarkable bicultural pilgrimages.
But first he was to plunge into the international
scene as Director of Communications of the
World Council of Churches in Geneva.
He graphically portrays this amazingly
exciting scene, hate-mail about the
Programme to Combat Racism, meeting
Desmond Tutu, travelling behind the Iron
Curtain, preparing for the 1983 Vancouver
Assembly, perhaps the last time the WCC
really impinged on the worldwide church.
But one senses a restlessness. He was too
far from home. So when the invitation came
out of the blue, as so often in his life, to the
Pastoral Theology chair in Knox Theological
Hall he jumped at it.
Culturally, this again was a different world
for him, a Presbyterian one. He describes
the lively mixture of students, half of them
Pacific Islanders, some radical, some very
conservative. What he doesn’t say is that
he turned the curriculum upside down in a
quite genial way, with a new focus on field
experience, to the delight of candidates

and colleagues.
Then came his Christchurch and Waiapu
periods, no doubt much better known to
Taonga readers. This is his ministry in full
maturity, dynamic, effective, and – of course
– much loved. What these chapters remind
us, however, is how hard the struggles were.
The ferocious opposition to the new Visitors’
Centre at Christchurch, for example.
Not the least of the interests in this book is
to see how this quintessentially non-angular
man nevertheless kept a determined eye on
a few non-negotiable goals. And eventually
carried the great majority with him.
Fascinating!
The fragments of the mosaic are coming
together now. The reflective second part of the
book does not altogether forsake the narrative
mode, any more than analysis had been
absent from the first part. At times he takes no
prisoners. The frustrations of finding a voice
for the Christian faith in a country where the
opinion-makers seem tone deaf to religion has
seldom if ever been better delineated.
He is often, too, extremely funny. And
moving, as when he speaks of “… seeing
the world, lit up, alive and radiant with the
presence of the holy.” ‘Finding a Future‘ is
about his own retirement, but equally about
the future for his beloved church. The story he
is telling, we begin to see, is not his but ours.
In so many ways he articulates the dilemmas,
celebrates the delights, spits out the hunches
of all of us.
The deceptively light touch reminds me
of what, in my own Celtic tradition, we call
a seannachie, a story-teller, the spinner of a
web which catches us all up in its music and
its musings. You put it down with a grin, and
feel encouraged. A bit humbled, too.
Take his description of that first-ever No
Ordinary Sunday service in ChristChurch
Cathedral; midway through it plunged the 220
people there into a silence lasting for five long
minutes: “The longer it went, the deeper down
you went, like diving into the river at Nuhaka
as a child, the hot summer sunlight cooled and
filtered through the grass-green water.”
In our end, one might say, is our beginning.
Peter Matheson is a former professor at Knox.

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

BOOKS

Experiences that set the church on fire
Transformed Lives: the move
of God that shook the New
Zealand church edited by Bev
Montgomery & George Bryant
Auckland: Castle Publishing,
2010. ISBN 978-0-9582822-4-6.
216 pages.
Peter Carrell

L

ike a dormant volcano
mistakenly thought to be
extinct which then erupts to
both the dismay and exhilaration
of onlookers, the Holy Spirit burst
into the consciousness of the
global church at the beginning
of the 20th century, spawning
the phenomenon known as
Pentecostalism.
For nearly half that century
Pentecostalism as an eruption
on the face of church history
flowed without effect on the (so
called) mainstream churches.
In the 1960s and 1970s (in
particular) the flow of the Spirit
in Pentecostalism-mode spread
into the mainstream churches,
generating a movement within
these churches, sometimes
experienced within local

parish life, sometimes through
conferences and camps which
stood on the edge of official,
organised denominational life,
but in both cases the description
given was ‘the Charismatic
Movement’ or ‘the Charismatic
Renewal.’
Arguably, we are at an
ambiguous point in the life of
the charismatically transformed
churches of the 20th century. Few
of us in positions of leadership
today were not touched by the
Charismatic Movement or by
Pentecostalism at a formative
stage in our lives, but how
many of us routinely bump into
manifestations of the Holy Spirit
as they were experienced in the
heady 60s and 70s?
This question is underlined
for me as I reflect on this book
of 20 stories of lives touched,
filled, and transformed by the
baptising dynamism of the Holy
Spirit. Each story tells of people’s
lives blessed by the Holy Spirit,
mostly with ‘signs following’ such
as speaking in tongues, healing,
deliverance, or empowering

for ministry. As I recall the
1970s, meeting people with
such testimonies was a regular
occurrence. But not so today.
Bev Montgomery, compiling
these stories, with editorial
assistance from George Bryant,
has done the NZ church a
singular service. Here is a
set of testimonies which lays
out the personal and intimate
experience of an unusual work
of God in our midst. At the time
it gained a descriptive name
or two. Currently its history
is beginning to be told (e.g.
by Rev Dr Dale Williamson of
Tauranga in her PhD thesis, An
Uncomfortable Engagement, the
Charismatic Movement in the
New Zealand Anglican Church,
1965-1985, University of Otago,
Dunedin, 2007).
No doubt that history in the
fullness of time will expound on
sociological and psychological
factors in this phenomenon,
and discuss such traces of its
presence in the official annals of
denominational life. But the heart
of the Charismatic Movement

and of the dramatic birth and
growth of Pentecostal churches,
along with new mission work
associated with them (e.g.
YWAM, participation in which
is a common theme here), is
personal experience.
This book is an enjoyable
reminder of that fact, and a
spirited challenge to today’s
church.
Rev Dr Peter Carrell is Director of
Theology House in Christchurch.
director@theologyhouse.ac.nz

his is a story book, of sorts.
Each chapter begins with
a story that illustrates its point,
making the book immensely
attractive and easy to read. I
appreciated,too, the inclusive,
non-judgmental way Karen
Smith shares her own journey of
discovery. She writes at a good
pace and chooses her quotations
with inspired wisdom.
A feature that could challenge
both the individual reader or
a group is a section after each
chapter entitled,“Draw your own

conclusion”, accompanied by
an extensive reading list. This
models Karen Smith’s basic
premise that each of us has a
unique relationship with God and
with Scripture, and thus our own
style of Christian spirituality.
Between belief and experience there’s a conversation,
which implies relationship. This
conversation is spirituality. But for
the conversation to begin, there
first needs to be a longing.
Belief, experience and desire
are the “building blocks” – the
foundation of our life in and for
and to God, who is unknowable
and yet is revealed as Love in
the life, death and resurrection of
Jesus Christ.
In the natural and compelling

flow of the book, we move
from each story to a people
formed into community. When
this community is “based on
the presence of Christ within
the world” (p59), then life in
the community becomes an
important aspect of Christian
spirituality.
Smith talks convincingly and
with great care about the costs
and the deep joy of compassion –
a caring with rather than a caring
for. Participation in suffering,
by life events or by choice,
offers “real participation in a
relationship with Christ.” (p123)
All of us long for a different
world, which is God’s initiative.
This waiting in hope and
expectation is balanced by

our quest for social justice,
genuine equality, real peace. The
tension between waiting and
acting therefore determines our
spirituality.
“Essentially, Christian
spirituality is nurtured through
life within community while
still longing for a different kind
of community: a community
participating in God’s love…now
and for evermore.” (p143)
This book both challenged
and affirmed my own journey, as
it will yours.
Maggie Smith is an Anglican priest
and spiritual director, living in rural
Canterbury.
thesmiths@farmside.co.nz
Page 45

ainstream Methodists
sometimes seem
the very last people
to appreciate the ministry of
their founder, John Wesley. He
is acclaimed by Charismatics,
Catholics, Lutherans and
conservative Wesleyans and
Nazarenes while the direct
inheritors of his legacy seem to
have little interest in his ministry.
New Zealand Methodism
gradually lost interest in its
historic heritage as it became
absorbed in ecumenical affairs
and in maintaining the institution.
Jim Stuart came to New

Zealand in 1980 as a relatively
young American and his PhD
on Methodism was completed
under the supervision of the
Lutheran theologian Gerhard
Ebeling in Switzerland. Now in
retirement, Stuart has at last put
together his vision of Methodism,
and presented it as a clarion call
to New Zealand Methodists.
The book does a great job
of popularising theological
ideas in a lively way. To enhance
understanding of Wesley’s

Making genuine
disciples of Jesus
doesn’t just happen even in the
best of churches unless it is a
part of the overall programme.

historical setting, the book
includes a series of prints by
Hogarth. The heart of the book,
however, is an interpretation of
Wesley, and how he fits into the
broader evangelical tradition.
From the very beginning
Wesley went one way and
his fellow preacher George
Whitefield went a very different
way. But just what was the
point of difference? How
come Methodism headed in
a very different direction from
Evangelicalism? In my view
the best part of Jim Stuart’s
scholarship is his analysis of
Wesley’s notions of expedience,
experience, consensus and
vision. This makes a lot of sense
of Wesley’s choices.
When Stuart comes to analyse
the characteristic features of
Wesleyan theology he focuses
not on theological views but on

attitudes and values, in particular
providence, compassion, grace
and love. I have some questions
about this, for Wesley could be very
emphatic and highly conservative on
doctrine. Moreover, I think Stuart is
so sympathetic to Wesley’s approach
that he (like Wesley himself) is rather
unfair to his opponents.
But this doesn’t diminish the value
of the book in giving New Zealand
readers a sense of Wesley’s spirit –
brim full of enthusiasm of the very
best kind.
Overall, Stuart calls for a church
built around values and attitudes,
not theology and property. I’m all
in favour of the former, but it is not
so easy to abandon the latter, and
I’m not at all convinced that Wesley
would have even dreamt of such an
approach!
Dr Peter Lineham is a religious historian at
Massey University.

Best of NZ’’s hymnody
Hope is Our Song: 158 hymns, carols and
songs by 48 New Zealand writers of words
and music
Nz Hymnbook Trust; Full Keyboard Settings For All
Songs And Guitar Chords For A Selection. 340pp, Wire
Binding. $30 Plus P&P. Available From Po Box 4142,
Manawatu Mail Centre, Palmerston North. Info@
Hymns.Org.Nz

Paul Ellis

T

his valuable resource reflects the
theology of our time and also the
increased awareness of God in our
daily routines and common rounds. Most
of our great hymn writers are represented,
and it’s especially pleasing to see some
established regional writers – Bill Bennett,
Marnie Barrell, Bill Wallace and Jocelyn
Marshall to name a few.
Hymnody is balanced with more
superficial material – both a strength and a
weakness. For example, A pinch of salt as a
song does not have the same gravity as God,
companion on our journey.
The test of a good tune is its easy adoption
by a congregation, individuality and simplicity,
use of repetition, how it supports the rhythm
and spirit of the text, and its longevity.

While I think Colin Gibson is overrepresented, his Anzac is an example of
a fine tune. It uses repetition skilfully and
enhances the Shirley Murray text superbly
by its rising pattern.
A criticism of hymnbooks published 40
or so years ago was that the melodies were
set too high for most congregations. There’s a
danger in this collection that too much melody
delves into the region around the break in
the human voice. It’s no accident that middle
C was not placed on the stave. Anzac, for
instance, would be more effective above the
break, in D major.
There are many fine melodies here with
sound, supporting harmonies. It is difficult for
any hymn writer not to unconsciously delve
into a melodic cliché from the past. How many
hymns do not remind one of a previously
composed melody? A metrical index would
have given alternatives for some hymns.
Will churches with only one copy seek
permission to print music and text? I hope so.
The copying machine is depriving publishers
and authors of royalties, so publishers of a
collection such as this should sell a copying
licence with the publication.
Paul Ellis is a Christchurch organist.

Anglican Taonga

SPRING 2010

F R O M T H E FA R S I D E

Imogen de la Bere discovers joy in the midst of a
recitation of decline

To absent friends

W

e have been enacting the
expatriate summer ritual.
Our friends and relatives
arrive in a steady stream
throughout the Northern Hemisphere
summer, bearing jars of Sanitarium
Marmite and funeral service sheets.
And once again we experience the
horrid jolt of learning who has died,
without our having experienced the
natural precursors of sickness and
decline, and without the necessary
opportunity to mourn.
We have not been able to say
goodbye, before or after death, to people
to whom we were once very close. And
even to those whom we knew slightly,
people whom we only remember
holding a glass at one of our parties and
swaying slightly.
My friend is dead – suddenly, horribly
dead, because I did not see him sicken
and decline. Torn from me unnaturally,
because I did not visit him in his last
days. Cruelly dead because the final,
personal words are forever unsaid.

Terribly, clinically dead because I cannot
weep at his funeral.
There are fewer things sadder than
this. It breaks your heart.
Choosing to live away from home, you
accept this as a cost. But it is the
only pang of exile which time does
not dull. For over time, more and more
people die –­ we sometimes feel our
beloved friends are being cut down in
swathes, rather than stalk by stalk. The
landscape once crowded with odd,
beautiful people, holding glasses and
slightly swaying, becomes a desolate
wasteland.
Perhaps worse is the other class
of news that comes with the annual
summer migration. It’s not so dramatic
as death, more a slow burn of sadness.
It’s the casual remark ,“Dear A has
completely lost the plot” or “B is in care
now, of course” or “Poor Old C – almost
completely blind”.
We can only imagine A, B and C
as vigorous adults managing their
lives and maybe a multi-million-dollar

enterprise. At that point you want to go
out and drive into a wall.
But why am I surprised by this
recitation of decline? Not so long ago,
at parties, the talk was all of divorces,
redundancies and midlife crises. Now
the same people swap tales of surgery
and pills. Everyone except me – who got
these things over with in childhood – is
either taking something or undergoing
something.
Young, you were interesting if you had
some serious illness; old, I find it cooler
to admit to nothing.
Shamefully, like Medieval survivors
of the plague, surrounded by death and
decay, I feel an insane desire to celebrate
being alive. To dance in the graveyards,
springing with flowers.
On reflection, perhaps it’s neither
shameful, nor insane. Perhaps it’s God
given.
Imogen de la Bere is a Kiwi writer living in London.
delberi@googlemail.com

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in the neighbourhood, somewhere in the Pacific, or beyond, we are all called to
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Anglican Taonga Spring 2011

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